Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: Yes, it's safe, it's very safe, it's so safe you wouldn't believe it.
Christian Szell: Is it safe?
Babe: No. It's not safe, it's... very dangerous, be careful.

-Marathon Man (1976)

One of the most effective and creepiest scenes in movie history is the one in Marathon Man in which Laurence Olivier asks Dustin Hoffman that question over and over. Parents ask themselves that question all the time to- about their kids and the internet.

The MySpace Problem

One of the most popular internet sites for young people is, of course, MySpace. For those few who don't know what MySpace is, you can be sure your teenaged kids know all about it. Here's the FAQ, but the very short answer is that MySpace is a hugely popular social networking site where users can share photos, journals and interests with their network of friends.

The problem, of course, is that kids often don't realize the risks of putting too much information about themselves on the internet and the information they put on the internet can be accessed by just about anyone. Friend and predator alike.

The sad reality is that the thing that makes these sites so popular, the prospect of sharing information and making new friends, is the thing that makes them so risky for kids.

MySpace, which was purchased by News Corp, has announced that it is taking measures to make the site safer for teens. Among those measures are the deletion of 200,000 "objectionable" user profiles. The objectionable profiles contained primarily "hate speech" and material gently described by Ross Levinsohn, head of News Corp's internet division, as "too risque." Too risque, right. Sadly, our culture blew right past risque in the 70's.

It's Really an Internet Problem

Mr. Levinsohn made a good point, however, in the Financial Times article linked above when he said about objectionable content:

It's a problem that's endemic to the internet - not just MySpace.

Absolutely, that's the case. Every parent I talk to struggles with a family internet policy that allows kids to use the internet for its many good uses while avoiding its many bad uses. My kids haven't locked onto computers and the internet yet, but I have run into problems merely by allowing one of my kids to do a Google image search for cats or bunnies. When my kids start clamoring to use the internet, you can be sure I will have redundant filters and site blockers in place. Not because I think they'll try to find the bad stuff, but because you can't help but find the bad stuff because there's so much of it.

Thank Goodness We Didn't Have the Internet

Don't get me wrong, had there been an internet when I was a kid, I would have gone to great measures to find exactly the sort of thing I now want to keep my kids away from. My friends and I collected quite a collection of impermissible contraband back in the day. But what was shocking in the 60's and early 70's is on primetime television now (which is why we watch exactly none of it in my house pre-bedtime). The indisputable fact is that there is a ton of stuff on the internet that most right thinking parents find totally unsuitable for their kids. All of this during a time when the internet is as much a part of most teenagers' lives as the telephone was to ours. And all of this during a time when the internet is all about "social interaction."

Is There a Solution?

What to do?

First, I believe we have to stop talking about teenagers as if they were in one group for internet purposes. There are many things that an 17, 18 or 19 year old can probably handle that should be completely off limits to a 13 or 14 year old. Nor, candidly, should we encourage 13 to 19 year olds to interact on the internet as social equals.

Additionally, kids learn a lot of stuff a lot faster today than we did back in the 60's. An 11 or 12 year old today is easily as sophtisticated as a 13-14 year old was back then. The fact that there's not a teen at the end of his or her age is not a compelling reason why he or she can't do something like use the internet or chat with a friend.

We need to decide what sites are OK for young children and which sites are not. There must be more than just a single division of web sites. To apply a 19 year old standard to a 13 year old is to ignore the problem, if not promote it. Likewise, to apply a 13 year old standard to a 19 year old is a recipe for non-cooperation and avoidance.

So why aren't these social networking sites being more proactive about this?

The crossroads comes, as it always does, at the intersection of money and morals.

Sadly, sin sells, both in the real world and the internet. Primetime television, music videos, even cartoons. For a company to do the right thing and prohibit marginal activities is to invite another operator to take that space. It's an unworkable situation that can only result in a potentially dangerous environment mitigated only by half-hearted measures and lip service.

Which is what this latest MySpace clean-up looks like to me.

Even in Second Life, which I have written about favorably, these issues are a significant problem. Second Life attempts to deal with the "sin" issue by creating a mature filter which if applied is designed to keep users away from the most extreme (read highly sexual) content. I suppose it works a little, but a stroll through the "PG" rated portions of Second Life demonstrates conclusively that there is a very mature element at work. Dance clubs with sexy names and logos, casinos on every corner. Fine for adults, not OK for kids.

Not to mention that you have no way to know that the person who looks like and claims to be a similar-aged kid may in fact be an old man. That is reason enough to keep youngsters away, but it is just the tip of the iceberg.

MySpace, Mayberry Style

All of this leads me to two conclusions.

First, my kids won't be allowed to use MySpace and its ilk, at least until they are in their late teens. Same for Second Life. They may not like it, but I don't let them wander around any strange place by themselves. Not in first life and not in second.

Second, the social interaction space is screaming for a family-oriented social networking site. MySpace, Mayberry style. Second Life with the Cleavers. Such a site would be welcomed by parents all over the world. I'd write about it weekly.

It would have to be developed by the right person or persons. Not an organization with an agenda to promote. But by a non-denominational organization that wanted to create a safe place for kids and make a little money too. Not greater fool money, but corner market money.

My internet utopia would have 3 age-based zones, each separate and independent from the others. 10-13, 14-16 and 17-19. New users would have to be verified in some meaningful manner by their parents. Parents would also be verified and would serve as volunteer safety officers- with the ability to report violations and to exclude their own kids from activities, but not the ability to interact directly in the virtual community.

Perhaps there would be a way to create private invitation-only sub-communities. I'd gladly set something like that up for my kids and their friends. Then I and the other parents could police it to keep order and make sure there are no interlopers.

Maybe something like that exists, but I've never heard of it.

As our kids get older and the internet gets more ingrained in our lives, it will become important to develop a family internet policy that allows our kids to enjoy the wonder of the internet while protecting them from it's darker side.

I hope someone will be up to the challenge. I'll certainly help any way I can.

I'm sitting here in my $400 a night room (and by room, I mean room, not big room and not suite) at the Hotel George in Washington, DC getting ready to give a lecture on ethics at Georgetown Law School. I've made my lecture notes and I have an hour or so to kill before I head over to the lecture hall and then rush to the airport to fly back home.

So I decided to read some of my feeds and see what's going on in the blogosphere. And I came across a great article.

Paul Boutin has an article at Slate about Web 2.0. It does a yeoman's job of explaining what Web 2.0 is, what it isn't and why it means different things to different people.

Paul begins by looking to Tim O'Reilly for a definition of Web 2.0. What he gets is a bunch of technobabble that will confuse many, irritate some and enlighten none:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an "architecture of participation," and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

That's a "pre-owned cars" take if ever there was one. Dude, just because you're a smart guy with a big platform doesn't mean you can't use regular words. Answer the question in a way that a normal person can understand. No one I know would get past the second line before writing off Web 2.0 as either a creation of the media or a buzzword for the nerd set.

If I ever get asked by one of my real world friends what Web 2.0 is, the first thing I'll do is faint. When I come to, I'll say it's a buzzword created by tech writers that refers to a new generation of online computer applications that generally promote social interaction via user-created content and user-supplied keywords that describe and organize that content. Some of these applications are core to that process and some are supportive by organizing the data into searchable lists and databases.

Paul goes on to describe other definitions of Web 2.0 used by other segments of the population.

Developers generally use Web 2.0 to refer to "gee-whiz features" of newly developed web sites, which are often based on Ajax, tag clouds, wikis and other collaborative tools. In general, these features are free (which is problem number one when someone tries to, say, sell one of them for $2B dollars), easy to master, and easy to interconnect.

And then comes the specter of Bubble 2.0:

A third definition gets thrown around in Silicon Valley. A "Web 2.0 play" is a bid to make money by funding a bring-your-own-content site. It's a long-shot but low-risk investment that could become the next Google. Or at least the next thing Google buys.

Bingo. I've said it many times and like a street preacher I will keep saying it until the cops run me off: as long as these companies and their VC handlers don't get desperate and start trying to take these science project turned companies public, that's fine. But we're starting to read more and more about IPO's in the planning.

When that starts happening, we'll know that Bubble 2.0 has reached a critical and dangerous stage.

Fortunately, Paul says that at least some writers and editors are hip to the salesmanship game that is sprouting up around some of these products:

Beyond that, publicists and self-promoters invoke Web 2.0 whenever they want to tag something as new, cool, and undiscovered- "This could be a big story for you, Paul!" That kind of hucksterism is what sends editors reaching for their red pens.

That's a good thing, because many more Newsweek stories and Web 2.0 may become a momentum play for the non-geek retail investor. When that happens, the huffing and puffing will grow geometrically and all that will be left will be to watch the lesser fools get wealthy while the greater fools take another bath.

Paul goes on to argue that, at least as of now, Bubble 2.0 doesn't look as dangerous as Bubble 1.0 was. I agree, for now. But you get Wall Street behind a few of these non-companies and let a couple of them make it out of the gate without a total disaster and you'll see a race towards our pockets that would rival the last one.

Here's to doing our part to keep that from happening, again.

Technorati Tags:
web 2.0, bubble 2.0

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Lotus founder Mitch Kapor joined Globespan Capital Partners and others in an $11M funding of Second Life. This funding follows an $8M funding in October, 2004.

Unlike most of the funding reports I read about, I get this one. It makes sense.

Second Life is in the process of winning the race for virtual reality mindshare. It's cool. It's popular. And it has an almost infinite list of potential revenue sources.

You can join Second Life and participate for free. But to own land and build things on that land, you have to have a premium membership. That creates revenue. Plus, there is a property tax equivalent that requires a user to pay a greater fee the more land he or she owns. For example, I own around 6,000 square meters of land in Second Life (this is a medium amount) and my "tax" is $40 per month. That creates revenue.

In addition to creating revenue, the property tax provides incentive not to let land lie vacant. You want to build something to make some money to offset the cost. It's a perfectly accurate economic and land use policy.

You can build, rent or sell almost anything in Second Life. I can imagine well placed ads and billboards being sold in Second Life at some point (the narrow strips of land next to roads are "protected" and owned by the "government"). More revenue.

I can imagine deals with all sorts of real world vendors to open shops in Second Life. Music, movies, you name it. Even more revenue.

The developer is working on a program to allow people to buy the exclusive right to last names (presently, you have a limited list of last names to choose from). I picked Snickerdoodle, which it turns out is the name of a cookie. Selling names will generate more revenue.

And these are just the potential revenue sources that jump out at me. I bet the Second Life team has hundreds of other ideas.

I'm sold on Second Life as a compelling way to interact on the net. I was talking to a guy in Second Life the other night and it turns out we read each others' blogs. Small world inside a small world.

I'm equally sold on Second Life as a business.

And that's an all too rare combination these days.

Mike Miller tagged me for the 4 Things Meme. I really enjoy memes because they are a fun and easy way to find out about people. I enjoy Mark Cuban's blog, but I disagree with him about memes. Those are some rock star-like statements from a guy I have always thought to be a (rich) man of the people.

Back to the meme. I answered these questions a few weeks ago, so tonight I asked Cassidy to answer them. Here are her answers:

Four Jobs I've Had

1) Secretary (for her 2nd grade class)
2) Tables (for her 2nd grade class)
3) Windows (for her 2nd grade class)
4) Pets (for her 2nd grade class)

Four Movies I Can Watch Over and Over Again

1) Twitches
2) High School Musical
3) Sky High
4) Kim Possible So the Drama

Four Places I've Lived

1) Texas

Four TV Shows I Love

1) Kim Possible
2) Lilo and Stitch
3) Tom and Jerry
4) Sponge Bob

Four Places I've Vacationed

1) Fort Worth
2) Galveston
3) Bandera, Texas
4) Florida

Four of My Favorite Dishes

1) Corn
2) Candy
3) Pickles
4) Popsicles

Four Blogs I Read Everyday

1) What's a blog?

Four Places I'd Rather Be Right Now

1) With my friends
2) Fort Worth
3) Bandera
4) School

Amanda Chapel has launched a PR blog called Strumpette.

What better way to kick-start some traffic than to play games with one of the most popular and well-respected bloggers in the world? Right?

No. Wrong. Very wrong.

She leads off by discussing an office pool she is in concerning how long Steve Rubel will stay at his new employer, Edelman. She goes on to give some alleged insight into the politics at Edelman and then she starts blasting Steve in the name of attention and traffic.

I'm not going to go point by point because I don't know squat about the PR business or the politics at Edelman and because I don't want to give this story or this approach legs, other than to join Doc in betting that Steve runs Edelman one day and to chastise Stowe a little for not calling BS on it (Stowe is one of my favorite reads, notwithstanding this momentary lapse).

In blogosphere politics, just like in real life office politics, some folks believe you can rise faster by throwing rocks at those around you than by just working hard and letting the results take care of themselves. I see it happen all the time with Scoble. People call for him to get fired and worse, all in the name of traffic and eyeballs.

These blogs are great, but behind every one of them is someone who is trying to make a living and live a life. It's fine to disagree- I do it all the time. But how you disagree with someone tells more about what you're made of than how you agree with them.

Blogs are getting to be like cars. It's easy to shoot the finger at someone from the safety of your car. It's getting too easy to do that from your blog. Snarky may be fine when we're disagreeing about music, movies or politics. The rules ought to be different when we're talking about our lives and jobs.

I think disagreeing with someone, be it Steve, Scoble or anyone else, in a way that may impact their life or their livelihood is one big bucket of wrong.

More evidence of huffing and puffing beneath Bubble 2.0, in the form of three hilariously troubling quotes.

Quote 1

First this one from "senior industry executives familiar with the matter," as reported by Steve Rosenbush of BusinessWeek Online, about the proposed sale of Facebook:

Facebook, the Web site where students around the world socialize and swap information, has put itself on the block, BusinessWeek Online has learned. The owners of the privately held company have turned down a $750 million offer and hope to fetch as much as $2 billion in a sale.

One guy told Steve that Viacom, which owns the MTV, VH1, and Comedy Central cable networks, might be a good buyer for Facebook.

Hey Viacom, I have a 2001 Ford Expedition in good shape that I'll sell you for $250,000. I've got some used power tools in the $15,000 range each. Call me. We can make a deal.

Quote 2

But the best quote from that article is this one:

[$2 Billion] may sound like a huge amount of money, especially when you consider that the company was launched just two years ago by a group of sophomores at Harvard University.

Ya think?

Quote 3

And the third and best quote of all comes from Russ Beattie in reaction to the above article:

I think my brain just blew up.

Mine too, Russ. And I'll tell you what else is blowing up: Bubble 2.0, that's what.

And a Sane Voice Says Calmly

Rafat Ali does his best to keep at least one of our collective toes in the pool of reality by pointing out:

[E]veryone, including Viacom, has looked at [Facebook] multiple times, parsed the valuation and options, and still could not think of a logical business reason for ponying up that kind of money. What I do know, from my sources, is that Facebook closed on a "huge round" of funding last week. So I would say the acquisition part is off the table, for now. [The] $2 billion figure is at best, hearsay, and at worst, media manipulation.

Actually, neither. It proposes to fill the huge and likely profitable space between the two.

Rob Bushway has a interesting post today that raises questions, both about Tablet PCs as well as the effect of the forthcoming UMPC/Origami on the love affair between mobile technology users and their Tablet PCs.

A UMPC/Origami is an "ultra mobile PC" (thus the name UMPC) that is significantly smaller than a Tablet PC. It has a 7" screen. Here is an FAQ with a little more information about them.

Rob points out that even though Tablet PCs are designed to be mobile and easy to take with you, a lot of people don't carry them around any more than a traditional notebook. They are too big to be unobtrusive and some people have found the notetaking features less productive than they hoped.

I agree with both of those concerns. I use my Thinkpad X41 Tablet PC all the time, but as a laptop replacement, not something to carry around with me like a super-charged PDA. Sure, I use it around the house a little, when I want to be outside, but need to stay connected for some reason. But mostly I use it on business trips in lieu of a traditional laptop.

We have an old Fujitsu tablet (no keyboard) that we keep downstairs for people to check weather, email, etc. My wife loved the idea in concept and she used it a bit when I first set it up, but now it gathers dust as she thinks it's too big and too slow (I agree with the first part, but I think she's making the slow part up).

But the fact remains that there is a big space between the current Tablet PCs and a PDA. Tablets are too big to carry around unobtrusively and PDAs (sorry, even Treos) are too small to use regularly for computing and internet functions.

So what do I think about the UMPC/Origami? I think the devil will be in the details, but if it does what reports claim it will application and internet wise, I agree with Rob that the future of mobile computing may very well include a UMPC/Origami along with a traditional laptop or tablet PC.

I'm not so sure that I wouldn't still have a Tablet PC, since I continue to believe that a Tablet PC will do everything a traditional laptop will do and more. But I can certainly envision UMPC/Origami taking a big role in the mobile technology space.

Fellow Houstonian James Kendrick provides a preview of how a UMPC/Origami might fit into your mobile technology plans (interestingly enough by looking back at his prior discussion of how to use a Sony U71).

I'll certainly want to take a long, hard look at a UMPC/Origami when they become widely available, but based on what I know so far, I expect one will end up in my briefcase.

Scoble, quoting his son today, said about the truest words I have read in a while. He said that Second Life is addicting.

Man, is it ever. After I had my own little temper tantrum this past weekend brought on by my inability to figure out how to build a suitable home in Second Life, I ventured back into the Second Life world. Six hours later, I was all fixed up.

With a nice, big house in an active area, with a pool, a plasma TV on the wall and a radio that plays classic rock music for anyone who happens by. My old house, in a quiet residential neighborhood, is up for sale.

It took some time, but I had no choice. I got hooked. At dinner Sunday night I found myself thinking about buying the land next to my new crib. Not since Civ. III has something like that happened.

Second Life may or may not be an OS, but it is, for many, the future of online interaction. It's not Microsoft that should be quaking in its boots- it's Myspace, et al.

As soon as enough people figure out how to get set up and do cool stuff in Second Life, I believe it will take dominant control over the interactive space. It's what Sims Online should have been combined with what many of the social networking sites are trying to become.

There is certainly the potential for an insider crowd or crowds to develop in Second World, but that's to be expected if it is to mirror the workings of our first lives. For example, I see all kinds of cool stuff being done by Eric Rice and others, but I have no idea how to get involved in that sort of mega-private development. You can buy a private island, but it is very expensive at over $1000 for the land, plus $195 a month for maintenance. But like anything else, if I want to know bad enough, I'll hang around the action and ask questions until I figure it out.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to visit my Second Life house, it's called Rancho DeNada and is located at Sibine (138,79). There's a pool, a dance floor, a couple of hot tubs and some music.

And, with any luck, that's just the start.

I continue to be intrigued by the idea of an unconference. I posted on the topic a few weeks ago and Christopher Carfi was kind enough the give me a primer via a blog post and a Comment.

I've never spoken at an unconference, but I've spoken at a lot of conferences and I've been to and presided over a lot of meetings. And I've listened to a few meetups via podcasts, which I like everyone else in the world listen to at my computer.

So I'm starting to get a handle on the conference/unconference business.

Today Dave Winer posts about unconferences and links to a cheat sheet he and some others pulled together about how to structure one. I have a couple of thoughts about all of this.

First, it seems to me that the key to an unconference must be a strong, impartial and fair-minded moderator. One who won't favor his or her friends and perspectives. One who will be fair to all. And most of all one who will keep some order to the event and avoid the inevitable descent into chaos that occurs when everyone wants to talk at the same time.

It's interesting that Dave posted the how-to on unconferences, since his attempt to bring up a 6 year old fight with John Markoff during the Berkeley Cybersalon is exactly the thing that should not be allowed to happen at a conference- un or not. If someone wants to pick a fight, do it offline. There are better things for the group at large to talk and hear about.

The hardest job of anyone who is presiding over a meeting or, I presume, an unconference, is to keep the issue from becoming personal or personality based. And if something is conference-worthy, there will always been some emotional buttons that, if pushed, can result in a loss of control and focus.

In theory, I am highly in favor of unconferences. I often wonder why I'm at the podium and the audience is in the seats when I speak at conferences. I have certainly wondered why others were at various podiums while I was in various seats. If done correctly, the unconference solves this dilemma by putting everyone on equal footing.

It's another tool used to flatten the earth. I like the flat earth.

Moderators will still have to deal with the fact that sometime a person's desire to be heard is inversely proportional to what he or she really has to say.

On the whole, I think the unconference idea is sound. But I suspect many of them can, do and will become chaotic, particularly when there is a large number of voices in the crowd.

The trick will be to create an equal right to be heard while maintaining order and a little structure.

And yes, the title to this post is a tribute to one of my favorite books of the 70's.

Technorati Tags:
conferences, unconferences

Aften almost 200 applications reviewed and 20 winner take all rounds, here are the winners of the preliminary rounds.

The Web 2.0 Wars March Madness will consist of 4 quarter-final matches, 2 semi-final matches and a champship round. During the playoff rounds, I will spend a little more time digging into each application, which will result in a more detailed review.

The teams will be grouped into the following groups for the playoffs.

Pageflakes
YouTube
Poddater
Tailrank (replaced Tagworld)
FireAnt

Last.fm
iKarma
Memeorandum
AllPeers
Riya

Wikipedia
Flickr
Myspace
Blogger
Pandora

Digg
Basecamp
Backpack
Technorati
Mercora

Look for the first quarter-final match in the next day or two.

It's time for Round 20 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

This is the final heat of the first Round. The playoffs will be next.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19

Here are the contestants for Round 20:

Mercora
StumbleUpon
ClipShack
MeetWithApproval
HomePortals
SpinSpy

Mercora is a music search service. It requires you to install software on your computer, so I can't comment on how well it works.

StumbleUpon is a browser extension that let's users rate and recommend web sites of interest.

ClipShack is a video hosting and sharing service. Crowded space.

MeetWithApproval lets users schedule and confirm meetings.

HomePortals returned error messages galore when I tried to visit. DQ'ed.

SpinSpy is a news by contest site, sort of like Digg

Before Today I'd Heard of:

0 out of 6.

And the Winner of Round 20 is:

Mercora in a very small and very weak heat.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

I've been spending a little time in Second Life, and have written about it here, here and here.

I still think it is a brilliant business plan (I've already spent around $100 there, without even trying), but I have seen some areas that need improvement.

I'd love to set up a major Newsome.Org or perhaps Err Bear Music presence in Second Life. Maybe get a little exposure for my music, etc. Maybe even do a Second Life concert series.

But as of the moment, I've concluded that it would be far too hard to set it up.

Here are 5 things Second Life Needs to do now:

1) Make Building a Lot Easier.

And I mean a whole lot easier. I bought a house and tried to add to it, but it was completely impossible, at least for me. In fact, I accidentally picked up my entire house and couldn't even get it back on my lot (which is pretty small). My placements were either unlevel or more often over the lot line. Granted, I'm sure there are a lot of people who can build stuff as easy as I can play a D chord, but it was impossible for me. I ended up just putting my lot back on the market and returned to the streets. With a house in my pocket.

2) Make Finding a Compatible Neighborhood Easier.

When I was looking for a place to buy, I found all kinds of land and houses and businesses for sale. It seems to me that, just like in the real world, neighborhoods in Second Life have particular characteristics. The last thing I want to do is buy and house and move into a neighborhood and find out that all of my neighbors are college kids or opera (either one) fans, or worse. I need to know where the middle aged tech-writers/musicians live. How about a Memeorandum street?

3) More Information About the Commercial Areas

And what about all those islands and commercial areas? How do you buy a condo or office somewhere? I finally gave up trying to get a place over by Scoble on Slackstreet. It's OK if all of those places (which by the way are ghost towns with nary a person in sight) are off the market or unavailable, but I wish I knew why. I don't know him, but Spin Martin seems to be the Donald Trump of Second Life.

4) Easy and Short Tutorials on Doing Stuff

I need to watch some very dumbed down tutorials on how to set up stuff within Second Life. For example, I'd love to set up some sort of radio station or public music player with some of my original songs on it, but I can't figure out how to do that. Stated another way, I'm sure there are all kinds of cool things you can do in Second Life, but I don't know how to do any of it. It gets frustrating.

5) I Need a New Name

I mentioned this before, but why are there limitations on character naming? Lots of people would probably like to take their internet presence into Second Life, but the naming conventions won't allow it.

I imagine that if I had all the time in the world, I could figure most of this out. But I don't, and I expect a lot of others don't either.

So these things need to be easier. A lot easier.

I like Second Life, but candidly the hard is starting to outweigh the cool.

Buck Owens died today in Bakersfield, California. He was 76 years old.

He was a great songwriter, a great performer and, of course, the host of Hee Haw. He wrote many great country songs, including Excuse Me (I Think I've Got a Heartache) and Act Naturally, which was covered by the Beatles.

I met him once when I was a kid. Pepsi opened a big bottling plant in my hometown in 1968. Buck Owens was the featured entertainer at the grand opening. Afterwards, I met him and he signed one of his 45 records and gave it to me. Of course I lost it sometime between then and now.

Along with Merle Haggard and George Jones, Buck Owens was the basis for my early and continuing love of country music (not to be confused with the drivel that comes out of Nashville these days).

Stephen Bainbridge has a post about crowds and experts. He wonders if there has been a study on whether prediction markets limited to experts in the field do better than prediction markets open to any and all comers.

Here's my, umm..., prediction: individually, the experts would do better, but the conventional wisdom of the all comers group would outperform most of the individual experts.

Christine Hurt follows up on that thought in the context of the Battle of the Encyclopedia Britannicas and the Wikipedias.

The answer, as far as I am concerned, is that crowds do fine as long as you remember to trust, verify and triangulate. That post by Jim McGee, which I have linked to before, is a compelling argument, at least to me, for the benefits of multiple data points.

And in the blogosphere, multiple data points requires a crowd.

Earlier this week, Caterina Fake posted 6 reasons it's a bad time to start a company. I didn't see that post until I saw Fred Wilson's follow-up today.

There are three of Caterina's reasons that I find particularly compelling, because they remind me of the build up to Bubble 1.0.

1. Everybody else is starting a company.

I remember during Bubble 1.0 there were so many tech-related companies being formed that you couldn't keep up with them. There were companies formed just to hold stakes in some of these startups. Some of these holding companies actually went public. Of course the insiders got silly rich and the retail buyers lost everything, but that was part of the game that lead to Bubble 1.0 and the pop heard round the world.

In the sports area alone, there were a ton of companies battling for reader eyeballs. I had 5 companies fly to Houston to try to convince me to either merge with them and become an insider (which I wasn't interested in because some part of me knew the whole game was a house of cards) or to sell one or more of my sports-related sites to them (I've told that story before).

Everybody was racing to get their product, network, etc. put together so they could go public and make some greater-fool money. As a backup, they could sell to Fox or Yahoo or someone with more cash who dreamed of becoming Fox or Yahoo.

4. You can't operate in obscurity anymore

This is a very good point that may actually save us from some of the greater-fool puffery that happened last time around. Even back in the mid to late nineties, the web was not the transparent, all-inclusive place it seems to be now. When some company wanted to buy one of my websites, I could get some information off their web page, but I still had to rely substantially on information I received from the company. Now there are thousands of mini-Naders blogging away about these companies.

Granted, there are some promoter-types out there writing about how wonderful most of this new Web 2.0 stuff is, and I'm sure some of them are making money in one way or another by doing it. But if you do your homework, you can get a lot more scoop about companies and the people behind them than you could back then.

Here's a good way to carve the promoters from the tech-enthusiasts: if someone is telling you that some new application is cool and useful, think tech-enthusiast; if someone is telling you that some Web 2.0, high school science project turned business is going to be the next IBM, the look for the money trail.

As a whole, the new internet is a check and balance against monkey business. But there will always be people who, intentionally or not, use their platform to promote as opposed to inform.

The check and balance, of course, are the posts and stories people write by the hundreds or thousands. Any of these tech-related startups who get into the IPO pipeline will be plastered all over Memeorandum and a ton of other pages (including this one) with people like me asking what about this company makes it a viable public offering?

And finally, I think a lot of people learned some hard lessons back in Bubble 1.0, which will put IPO's under greater scrutiny now. Back then, any tech-related IPO would make you money. I'm not sure that's the case now. I have bought exactly one IPO in the past 5 years- and I have passed on opportunities for quite a few.

5. Web 2.0 isn't all that.

Amen, sister. Caterina's company, Flickr, is the king of the new companies, so she knows what she's talking about.

Just look through some of my Web 2.0 Wars series posts and try to find businesses with enough legs to warrant even dreaming of big money. They're hard to find.

IPO's are still largely off the table (thankfully), so the exit strategy is to get bought by some bigger company who is desperate to get into the internet race.

The odds are long and the door is closing.

When is the Only Time You Should Start a New Company?

Here it is, in one, easy to remember sentence.

When you have a product or service to sell that enough people will buy to create a reasonable profit without relying on advertising revenue.

That's it. Plain and simple and old-fashioned. And smart.

I did a new podcast tonight.

No particular theme, but it has my favorite selection of songs so far, including songs by Goose Creek Symphony, Slobberbone, Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Toby Darling, a funk song I spent 20 years looking for and more.

The blogosphere's been a bit slow lately, so there's not a ton of tech talk. I did talk a little about old media arrogance in the context of the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

50 minutes of country rock, classic rock, tech and blues.

Click here to listen or download.

Podzinger users can get it here.

You know the drill. Open up your jukebox of choice, point the shuffle feature to your entire library of songs and list, without exception, the first 10 or so songs that play. I like to add a little commentary about some of the artists, songs, albums, etc.

The Heart of Saturday Night - Tom Waits (The Heart of Saturday Night) (1)

Everything's Gone - The Mertons (Girandole) (2)

Hunting High and Low - A-Ha (Hunting High and Low) (3)

Green Apple Quick Step - The Byrds (Byrdmaniax) (4)

Honky Tonk Baby - Highway 101 (Bing Bang Boom) (5)

I'd Rather Drink Muddy Water - Johnnie Taylor (Who's Making Love) (6)

It's a Man's Man's Man's World - James Brown (Star Time) (7)

Southern Loving - Jim Ed Brown (The Essential) (8)

Old Joe - Guess Who (Canned Wheat) (9)

Sweet Thing - David Bowie (Diamond Dogs) (10)


(1) My pal G-Man and I went through a phase where we listed to nothing but Tom Waits. This is a great song from a great record.

(2) This record has come up before. Great driving alternative country. A must-buy for alt. country fans.

(3) People sometimes sell the 80's short musically, and that's a mistake. The alternative rock, particularly coming out of the UK, back then was pretty amazing. Beautiful song.

(4) An often overlooked Byrds record from 1971. This is a good an instrumental romp as you're going to find.

(5) This is the lesser version of the once great band, after the wonderful Paulette Carlson left. Good workman like country music, but not a good as the prior records.

(6) A fine song from a great record by the seond best soul singer ever. Yes, ever.

(7) A fine song from a box set by the best soul singer ever. Yes, ever. I make my kids listen to The Godfather at least once a month. They have to appreciate.

(8) Normally I just play Pop a Top over and over, but this is another good song by a country legend.

(9) The Guess Who made some fantastic records, including this gem from 1969. You've heard their hits, but their records have a ton of great songs you've never heard. One of my favorite all-time bands.

(10) By far the best David Bowie record. I love this song and I love this record. It's a masterpiece. Haunting. Rent 1984, put it on the DVD and mute it, put this record on.

Technorati Tags:
jukebox annotated, music reviews

In one of the 2006 trend prediction threads, I mentioned that I was not sold on VOIP because of the uncertainty that 911 calls will work.

I argued that while internet phone calls may be a trend, before VOIP will be a meaningful alternative to traditional land or mobile lines, someone will have to convince millions of people like me that if we dial 911 on VOIP, someone will answer who can help and knows where we're calling from. There are often no mulligans when it comes to a 911 call, so creating certainty in the minds of the masses will be critical to the trend-ablility of internet phone service. Otherwise it will be a utility for a few and a toy for many.

Sadly, a man in Minnesota found out the hard way that, in fact, there are no mulligans. He called 911 over his Vonage VOIP line when a fire started in his house and, get this, was put on hold by Vonage while his house turned into a 5 alarm blaze.

This is why VOIP is a gadget, not a utility.

Frankly, I can't believe companies who bungle such an important part of phone service are allowed to do business.

It's time for Round 19 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18

Here are the contestants for Round 19:

Yelp
Smarkets
Inform
Filangy
Magnolia
43things
ShoZu
Technorati
Wrickr
Feedmarker

Yelp is a review aggregator with a local flavor. It catagorizes reviews by city.

Smarkets is a "stock market for products" game based on products sold at Amazon. You can buy or short. One of the most insufficient FAQs I've ever seen.

Inform is a new aggregation site. Users can create custom channels for topics of interest. It collects and connects the content, as opposed to relying solely on RSS feeds (they say that makes it better).

Filangy says is is "an exciting new concept in search that caters to the user's specific searching needs and provides results that are needed." OK, but that doesn't really tell me anything. Needs more meat on the About page.

Magnolia is a beautifully designed social bookmarking and content management service.

43things is a goal setting and sharing service. Good mindshare, but I don't really get it. Maybe I need to think up some goals.

ShoZu is a mobile phone service that helps you to save photos and videos from your camera-phone to your preferred online sharing site. it works with Flickr and a bunch of others.

Technorati is a blog search and tagging service. Huge mindshare, and I've called it the backbone of the blogosphere.

Wrickr has no meaningful information on its web page. Another example of a company tossing a web site up before there's anything to see.

Feedmarker is a bookmarking service, that includes a feed reader and tagging. And it's open source (good marks for that).

Before Today I'd Heard of:

3 out of 10.

And the Winner of Round 19 is:

Technorati in a photo finish with Magnolia.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

It's the control over the distribution of the writing.

Scott Rosenberg, who is rapidly becoming one of my favorite reads, has more today on the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

The audio from the meetup can be heard via Andrew Keen's AfterTV podcast (thanks to Sabine for the heads up via a Comment). It is a little over an hour's worth of mostly interesting conversation, and if you doubt that Steve Gillmor has the best handle on the blogosphere, one listen will erase any doubt. He is one smart, to the point dude. My Gillmor Gang envy keeps on growing.

Anyway, Scott is responding to a post by long-time blogger Rebecca Blood in response to Scott's initial report from the Berkeley meetup.

Rebecca's Take

Rebecca's point is that traditional publishing is about printing books and articles they can sell, which has little to do with finding the most well written material:

When publishers evaluate a book proposal, they don't ask if the work is true or original or insightful or well-written. First and foremost, they ask themselves if they can sell it. If they don't think they can, they pass. If they believe there is a market and that they can effectively market the work, they buy it.

Scott's Take

Scott mostly agrees with Rebecca, but draws a distinction between the business side of publishing and the editorial side:

Most editors wouldn't be so imprudent as to claim that they are publishing "the best" anything; usually, they'll talk about trying to publish "the best" that they can find for their particular readers. The most effective editors have an accurate sense of who those readers are and what they want.

My Take

First of all, as someone who has written a ton of newspaper and trade journal articles, my experience has been that most editors are looking for something interesting to publish, period. Perhaps this isn't the case at the New York Times and its ilk, but most publications are hungry for stuff to publish. Whether they will admit that or not is another story, but it's true.

Initially, there is a process that is at least somewhat designed to locate (a) something well written that (b) fits the focus of the publication.

Veteran writers know the focus of the publications they write for and can generally hit the nail on the head focus-wise on the first try. If you're an unknown, the bar is higher and the writing must be more compelling to pass muster. If you are a recognized name or authority, the bar gets lowered a little. Perhaps a little ironic, perhaps not. But true.

I'm no John Markoff (and far, far from it), but when I write an article, I have little to no doubt I can get it published by one publication or another. More times than not, it's the first one I offer it to.

The first couple of articles are sort of tough, but after you've been doing it a while, you realize it's just not that hard to get publications to use your stuff.

Granted, I am not writing to make a living (it's more of a marketing thing for me), but I have been doing it for a long time and I have to believe my experience mirrors that of many others.

But It's Not About the Writing

My bottom line on all of this, however, is that everyone has it a little wrong. We've been talking about the right things, but not from the correct angle.

Old media is not in crisis because we are writing our blogs. Old media is in crisis because of a two step process is taking away its stranglehold on the distribution of writing. The easy analogy is the record labels and the way they grasp at the catless bag in the face of new distribution channels for music that bypass the labels. Like traditional newspapers, the record labels are in the twilight of their relevance.

So back to the newspapers.

First eBay and Craigslist take away a chunk of the beloved classified ads and that long-standing revenue stream.

Now bloggers (which include not only morons like us, but also geniuses like Andrew Keen) are chipping away at the content distribution model. There is a lessening of the need for a middleman to direct content to us. We can produce, publish, find, read and reply to it ourselves.

And this trend is in its infancy. It will continue and, if the traditional newspapers don't adapt, it will make them economically infeasible. That's part of the basis of my 8 Steps to Save the Merc post.

So it's not about the writing, and it's not about the quality of the writing. It's about the loss of control of the distribution of the writing.

According to Techdirt, the email loving folks at Plaxo may finally be bending to the collective will and reassessing their email policies.

I regularly get emails via Plaxo telling me that people I know and sometimes people I don't are updating their address book and encouraging me to update my information via Plaxo. It's an example of an idea that sounds good in theory (let's enable users to easily obtain current contact information and add it to their Outlook contacts list) that goes horribly wrong when put into action.

It goes wrong simply because the updating process is based on unsolicited emails to contacts asking them to update their information via Plaxo. I think it's great if someone wants to add my information to their address book, but not if I have to get emails I don't want and/or sign up or give information to some service.

After apparently waiting to enact any changes until enough people signed up for their service, Plaxo has indicated that it will throttle back the emails. Here's a quote from one of Plaxo's founders that tells you a lot about Plaxo's commitment to being a good net citizen:

[W]e've always known that the update requests were a means to an end -- our goal has always been to get as many members as possible so that these e-mails were unnecessary. And it looks like we're finally getting to that end.

Anyone who takes even a second to think about that statement will realize that it's like a litterbug who just dumped all his trash on the side of the road saying that littering is bad. Or the guy who just made a ton of money selling email addresses deciding to become an anti-spam advocate.

It's easy to diet when you're full and it's easy to act right after you've gotten the spoils of acting wrong.

According to some of the Comments to the Techdirt post, Plaxo is now bundled with AOL Instant Messenger. There's nothing that will get a program deleted from my computer any faster than trying to stuff a bunch of unwanted programs onto my hard drive.

I find product bundling to be just as distasteful as spam. That's just my opinion and perhaps others disagree.

But while less Plaxo email is a welcome thing, let's not start handing out citizenship awards to Plaxo just yet.

It's time for Round 18 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17

Here are the contestants for Round 18:

Lexxe
Lookster
PXN8
Measuremap
Facebook
Netvibes
Goowy
MyVideoKaraoke
Gmail
Backpack
Platial

Lexxe is a search engine. One thing I like about it is that web searches and blog searches are combined.

Lookster is not yet live and has no information at all on its web page.

PXN8 is an online photo editing application. You can also buy a copy and install it on your computer.

Measuremap, recently bought by Google is a stats tracking application.

Facebook is a social networking site limited to college students.

Netvibes is an Ajax-based personal portal page. It probably has the greatest mindshare of the new portal players.

Goowy is a very nice looking personal portal page, that adds some extra features like online file storage.

MyVideoKaraoke is a site where users can upload videos of people singing karaoke songs. There aren't all that many songs up yet, but this is a really interesting idea.

Gmail is Google free, web based mail. I wrote about it here.

Backpack is an online information collection and storage application. Sort of like a turbo-charged on-line Onfolio or One Note.

Platial is a collaborative atlas. You can add tags for locations of places that you are others may be interested in. Neat idea.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

7 out of 11.

And the Winner of Round 18 is:

Backpack, in a hotly contested heat. Backpack has a lot of potential as a one-stop shop for online storage and information organization.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

OmegaMom posts the best defense I have read yet to Andrew Keen's continuing tirade against our scribblings.

Among her many good points is the following:

Nobody is claiming that all those blogs out there are, de facto, gems of literature that will gleam forever. What is claimed is that the froth will generate some value, that some people whose eloquent or expert or funny voices would never have been heard before will gain some well-earned followings. Even people who start out with the attitude that "blogs are stupid" can discover, to their amazement, that there are folks out there with voices that appeal to them, and experiences that resonate with them.

I'll put that writing up against any self-aggrandizing drivel spouted off by Andrew's "elite talent" any day.

Great stuff.

This is Part 2 of my 10 applications post. Part 1 is here.

Here are applications 6-10

6) Ulead Video Studio

I've made movies with all sorts of hardware and software and Ulead Video Studio is the best bang for the buck I have found. I use it all the time and while no application is perfect, this one comes pretty close.

7) Behind Asterisks

I forget my passwords fairly often and this little decryption utility has saved me more times than I can count.

8) Atlas Find and Replace

I posted a glowing endorsement of this excellent find and replace utility last year, after it helped me change hundreds of web pages in less than 2 hours. This is a must have application for anyone who develops any sort of internet content.

9) FinePrint

I print all of my documents via FinePrint, which allows you to print multiple pages on a single sheet, to print double sided, to add watermarks, headers and footers and much more.

10) Microsoft Photo Story

The older I get, the more I find that the movies I enjoy making the most are just photos set to music. There are a lot of programs to do this, but the best one is both easy to use and free. All of the photo-videos I have posted on Newsome.Org were made with Photo Story 3.

These are some of my most valued applications. Tell me about yours in the Comments.

Tags: software review, personal productivity

I didn't have a chance earlier today to test the newly released Google Finance service. Om, whose judgment I trust (even if I do have to beg him for the link love ), says it's disappointing.

First a word about the finance sites I currently use and then let's dive into Google Finance.

A Little Background

I am not really an active stock trader these days, but I was back in the mid to late nineties. I told the quick version of my story in an excerpt from my podcast the other day. The bottom line is that I have made a lot of money and lost a lot of money in the stock market. Along the way, I have tried a lot of different financial sites. Some were free, some were made available to me by media companies I provided content for and some I paid for.

Presently, I use two and only two (not counting the brokerage sites where I do my trading, but which I use only lightly for research). My Yahoo, where I track the market and my stocks in my left column, and Morningstar, where I do a lot of my research (Disclosure: I have owned Morningstar stock since the IPO).

So lets take a look, in real time, at Google Finance.

Initial Impressions

The front page looks desolate. What is appealing about Google's search page doesn't work here. I see a link to add stocks to your portfolio, but unless it's well hidden I see no way to add stocks other than one at a time.

Some sort of import feature is a must in future releases.

I added a few stocks, all but one (Google) of which I actually own. The Ajaxy entry screen is fast, but there needs to be a way to import portfolios. Once more- there has to be an easier way to add your portfolio.

Oddly enough, your portfolio doesn't show up on the front page. There is a list of recent quotes you have looked up, but I see no way to personalize the front page. Surely I'm missing something?

What About the Quotes?

OK, so let's look up a quote. I own AT&T and have been thinking about selling it for a while.

Here's where Google Finance gets a little more impressive.

The quote info and chart are pretty neat. I love the way the times of the news stories are reflected on the chart. The news story links are logically placed and easy to access. I like the blog post links at the bottom, but I don't read blogs for stock buying ideas.

Message Board into Chaos

There are message boards (called discussions) that you can join or start, and I can imagine a horde of pumpers and dumpers lining up outside the walls. There do seem to be some safeguards in place and one of the current pump and dump favorites did not have a link to join or create a discussion.

But I can tell you from vast experience that these message boards will rapidly descend into chaos and will become useless in short order. I predict they'll kill them all off within a year.

At first I didn't see links to major holders, insider sales and SEC filings, all of which are available at Yahoo, but there they are at the bottom left of the screen. I wish there was a Morningstar link down there.

Conclusions

My initial conclusion is that Google Finance is underwhelming as far as customization goes, but that the data returned when you lookup a quote is reasonably impressive.

Om's right, however, when he says "[I]t will be a long time, and I mean long time in Internet years that is, before Google Finance really catches up to Yahoo Finance, which in fact is the gold standard."

It's time for Round 17 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16

Here are the contestants for Round 17:

Truveo
NewsVine
egoSurf
Clipfire
Mozy
Quimble
Basecamp
Pegasus News
Remember The Milk
Squidoo
PictureCloud

Truveo is a video search engine. It seems pretty fast.

NewsVine is a social bookmarking site that combines features of a number of other services, such as Digg and Google News. I talked about it here.

egoSurf is a program that searches your name and web site and tells you where you stack up on the web. I got a 9346. I hope that's good. I think this is a cool idea.

Clipfire is is a shopping search engine and community. I want to buy a Dell 1900FP monitor, but when I searched for it I got links to all sorts of Dell stuff. Same result for Thinkpad X41. Unless I'm missing something, there results are not focused enough.

Mozy is a free remote backup service. You get 1G of space (2 if you fill out a survey) in return for accepting some ads via email.

Quimble lets you create and share polls. I've noticed some nice looking Quimble polls on various blogs.

Basecamp is a web-based tool that lets you manage and track projects. Prices range from free to expensive. I like the fact that I haven't seen a million of these and they actually charge for the service, thereby at least giving a nod to a legitimate business plan.

Pegasus News is a "local media venture" (whatever that might be) to be launched in Dallas, Texas in "early 2006." OK.

Remember The Milk is an online method to manage to-do lists. Nobody tell my wife about this site, please. Cool looking site.

Squidoo is a site where people post content on topics they care about. They say it's a combination of Friendster and Wikipedia.

PictureCloud is a service that lets you create 360 degree photo representations of stuff. Unfortuntately all the samples were cut in half when I viewed them via Firefox. Not good. They worked in Internet Explorer.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

4 out of 11.

And the Winner of Round 17 is:

Basecamp nudges out Remember the Milk, just because it has a business plan that doesn't rely solely on ads.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

Digital Inspiration has an easy to follow tutorial that will allow you to have integrated voicemail on your blog or other web page in about 5 minutes.

It uses an Odeo feature, and includes a way to embed the voice mail application directly into your page.

I added voicemail capability to our Contact page.

If there was any hope that Andrew Keen was only kidding a few weeks ago when he laid this nugget on us:

If you democratize media, then you end up democratizing talent. The unintended consequence of all this democratization, to misquote Web 2.0 apologist Thomas Friedman, is cultural 'flattening.',

such hope was crushed by Keen's statements at the recent Berkeley CyberSalon.

Christopher Carfi posts a report from that gathering that makes it clear that Keen is still preaching that blogging allows idiots too much of the soapbox that should be reserved for the old media elite.

If I'd been there and managed not to hurl all over my laptop, I would have raised my hand and asked him two questions:

(a) Who decides who is elite? Is merely a press pass from a newspaper evidence of elite status or is there more to it?

(b) Are you one of the elite? If so, who anointed you such? And if not, aren't you adding to the problem by having a blog?

The first thing I ask myself when someone tries to create a line of demarcation (elite, non-elite, etc.) is "who decides where the line goes" and "who decides who decides where the line goes." Those two questions will help you cut through more bullshit than any other questions you could ask.

Scott Rosenberg has a report on the CyberSalon as well, which contains some past and present Keen quotes:

The purpose of our media and culture industries is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent.

What is the value in sharing experiences? I grow weary of your scribblings.

Clearly this guy is either the most arrogant person to ever poke at a keyboard or he's found an angle and is going to ride it as far as it will take him. I don't know him, but he certainly seems to have come upon a recipe of arrogance, big fancy words and outlandish statements that gets him a lot of attention.

My grandmother used to tell me that arrogance was a distraction to mask insecurity, but she wasn't part of the elite media, so what did she know.

Scott sums up the recent non-conversation very well:

To Keen, that sort of talk is part of a "cult of creative self-realization." "The purpose of our media and culture industries," he writes, "is to discover, nurture, and reward elite talent"; blogging opens the door to too many mediocre voices. When he tried to apply this critique tonight, Des Jardins shot it down with a single line that exposed its irrelevance to the conversation: "The cream also rises in the blogosphere."

In the interest of cooking the whole pancake, let me say that I agree with some of what Andrew says on his blog, particularly the Web 2.0 stuff. He has this need to make sure you know how smart he thinks he is, but once you filter out the extra noise, a lot of what he says is spot on. And, perhaps intentionally and perhaps not, he can be very funny (as in his MySpace take).

But he's completely off base on the whole elite media business.

Oddly enough, my hunch is that he knows it.

Doc Searls posted today a much clearer, first hand version of what I tried to say the other night about those brave souls (be they A-Listers or not) who stood up for Dave Winer in the face of his unpopular (be they justified or not) actions and the blogonslaught that followed.

I'm sure Doc will take even more abuse than I did (via Comments and particularly email), but Doc's post is example number 1 of someone looking beyond a person's faults (which Doc admits Dave has) and at the bigger picture.

I don't know who's right or who's wrong in the OPML mess. I don't know Rogers Cadenhead, though from reading his blog he seems like a pretty nice fellow. Few would accuse Dave of being a nice fellow. But whatever the story is, it goes way beyond one letter from some lawyer and a couple of blog posts.

The fact that I'd rather hang out with Rogers (and, for the record, I would) does not make him 100% right and Dave 100% wrong. The truth is almost always somewhere in between. That's for someone with more interest and access than me to determine. But we can't and shouldn't digg Rogers to victory just because some of us like him better.

Most of us will never know all the facts. Some of us (myself included) don't care enough about the matter to try to figure them out.

But let me point out again that there are two sides to every story and to act without considering the other side of the pancake is to act too hastily.

Once the discussion becomes politicalized (and this one was from the first minute) right and wrong too often gets lost in the rush to posture and discredit.

Mark Cuban posts today about the DRM Evolution, that may lead hardware producers to keep changing the playback devices to match the evolving DRM requirements. Down the road, content you legally own may not play back on hardware you legally own because of incompatibilities with the then current DRM protocols.

The record label cartel's answer, of course, would be to go buy another copy of the same song you have already bought on LP, 8-track, cassette, CD and MP3.

Mark's answer is to crack stuff you own and keep a DRM-free back up copy.

It's hard for a guy from Houston to give too much love to a dude from Dallas, but damn I love that guy.

I've said many times that I have not and will not buy music that is infested with DRM. If I accidentally did, I would absolutely crack it and and make a back-up copy.

There's a lot of talk in the blogosphere about the Save the Merc campaign launched by some of the writers of the San Jose Mercury News in the hopes of finding a buyer who will save the newspaper.

First, I think the Mercury News is a good paper and while I don't read any newspapers in their native online or offline format, it has been a bookmark of mine for a long time.

The reality is that the Merc can't be saved. Not in its current format. Because traditional newspapers are in the twilight of relevance and the verge of obsolescence. In one of my favorite quotes of the year so far, Steve Rubel summed up the future thusly:

Flash forward 10 years from today. We will look back and laugh how quaint it was that we received our news on dead trees. Yes, I am saying the word "newspaper" will be a misnomer. News will be delivered automatically each day, not by the paper boy, but via wirelessly enabled e-paper devices that are easy to read. All of it will be powered by RSS.

If someone wants to really save the Merc, here's exactly how to do it:

1) The first thing we do, is kill all the pop-up ads. A hip, forward thinking organization should know better.

2) Drop the print version. Gone. No More. Nada.

3) Go completely online. Sell text-based and static ads. No flash and no pop-ups. Require a free registration to get most (but not all) content online and require free subscribers to accept one email per day with special subscriber features and, of course, targeted ads.

4) Create a premium subscription, required to get all content, including some audio-video content. Sell these subscriptions for something close to the cost of a current newspaper subscription. In addition to all content, this will include the ability to search archives at no additional cost and some sort of bookmarking, tagging feature for future reference.

5) Create a complete RSS feed of the paper, organized by section- just like the print edition (Front Page, Local, Business, Sports, etc.). This would be a better organized version of the many RSS feeds that are already available. Create an online application that will allow subscribers to customize their subscription feed to include just the parts they want. The idea would be that each user could receive a custom edition of the paper via a single RSS feed.

6) Sell that feed as a subscription (as an alternative to the online edition and with a discount for people who want both the online and RSS editions). This is the future of news distribution, and the place to spend the most time and effort.

7) No adds in these feeds. None.

8) Once you make this move and perfect the online delivery of news, create a subsidiary to sell transition services to every other newspaper in the world as they follow you online.

This is the way to save the Merc.

Whether the saving is done by the new owner or some other owner, who likely would not be a traditional newspaper company, doesn't really matter. What matters is that one of the best newspapers in one of the most tech focused parts of the world with the highest percentage of tech readers is available to blaze the trail into the future of news distribution.

So someone should step up to the plate and do it.

Everything else is either delaying the inevitable or wishful thinking.

We had a grand time at the ranch in Bandera. Lots of trail rides, hay rides and other really fun stuff. Spring break is over and the girls are back in school. I'm on the last day of my vacation, cleaning horse poop off of trucks, shoes and clothes and storing our camping/ranching gear until we head off for Frio II in August.

Now it's time to talk about the tech aspects of the trip.

My travel hardware consisted of:

My X41 Tablet PC
My Blackberry 7130e
My Sprint Power Vision phone

The X-41, as I said in the post above, is the best traveling computer I have ever owned. It worked great. With my Logitech QuickCam for Notebooks I was able to easily record daily summaries, and, had I wanted to bore you to tears, could have easily published them to my blog. The X-41 (with the help of a card reader) was able to view the photos on the Memory Stick I use in my digital camera. In fact, I uploaded a few photos while we were still there.

What I didn't know before we got to the ranch was whether I would have any internet access. There is none there and there are no wireless networks in the area to "borrow." So I had to hope Verizon's national wireless broadband network would reach to Bandera.

Not only did it reach, but the signal strength was 3 out of 4 bars. Connecting was easy and stable. This wireless deal is definitely worth the $15 extra per month that I pay for it. I will be able to use it in airports, hotels, etc. And the best part is that the phone charges off the USB cable, so the phone is being charged while you use it to connect to the internet.

While my Blackberry is my primary mobile phone, I used my Sprint phone while on the trip and it worked perfectly.

And it has me completely sold on Sirius Satellite Radio. You can listen to a selection of the Sirius stations with the Sprint phone and, with the supplied earbuds, the sound is excellent. It does drop the signal periodically, which is mildly annoying, but this is a cool feature. It is just one of the legion of audio and video features of this very cool phone.

I've been an XM subscriber for years, but nothing on XM is as good as channel 14 on Sirius. It's called 60's and 70's Vinyl and I have yet to hear a bad song on it. I wish Sirius made a truly portable device. If so, I'd buy it (the Sirius S50 is not truly portable in the sense that it doesn't receive the signal while unattached to its base).

I don't know who's paying whom to carry the Sirius stations on these Sprint phones, but Sirius ought to be paying Sprint because this feature will sell some Sirius equipment.

The tech worked as it was supposed to and allowed me to check my email and remain connected to my home and office while deep in the Texas hill country.

As I have mentioned before, while Newsome.Org is hosted on my server, I use Blogger to publish and manage content. While not perfect, there are a lot of advantages to doing that. One, it was easy to set up when I first started using a blogging platform. Two, it allows me to easily publish from the road when I travel- even if I am using a borrowed computer.

But it is not perfect. On those infrequent, but regular, days when blogger is down, I can't post. Plus, there are a lot of features I need (categories, built-in trackbacks, etc.) that blogger doesn't have.

So I looked around, consulted Eric Scalf, my blog platform guru, and decided to try to move my content to WordPress. I talked some about this project before.

Eric recreated my blog template perfectly, and everything looked like a go.

Then we hit a roadblock.

It seems there is no easy way to move my prior posts to WordPress without changing the URL of the post pages, which would break my inbound links. Sure, I could leave two versions of the old post pages up, but that sort of defeats the point, at least in my mind.

There is a work-around, but that work-around requires technical chops that neither I nor 99.9% of the world's bloggers have. The last thing I'm going to do is push a button and rely on technology I don't understand to gently and accurately handle a year or two's worth of content. If it doesn't work, then I don't know how to fix it. That would be, to quote Jim Rome, "below average."

So, here's the thing.

First of all, this has got to be a serious obstacle to any established blogger who wants to move his or her blog over to WordPress. I'd move today if not for this problem. Granted, it may be a problem created by Blogger's crackhead URL handling, but Blogger is not going to fix it. In fact, Blogger probably loves it because it operates as user glue. So if established bloggers are going to move to WordPress, WordPress is going to have to fix it.

Second, and of more use to readers, Eric has published a very detailed and helpful post outlining how to move from Blogger to WordPress and describing the hurdles we experienced.

I can vouch for Eric's expertise at template transfers, so if you are thinking of hiring him to work on your template, consider this a reference. Don't ask him to do it for free, because it is a lot of hard work.

What even Eric can't do, however, is fix the URL naming convention problems that stopped me in my tracks.

I'd love to move to WordPress, but at the moment that looks to be nearly impossible. I wonder how many other bloggers have considered moving only to turn back in the face of this hurdle?

If you need one more reason not to hitchhike in these dangerous times, someone might force you to eat pizza and drink wine.

Found via Obscure.

It's time for Round 16 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

Here are the contestants for Round 16:

Vizu
Digg
Del.icio.us
Omnidrive
AlmondRocks
Tagyu
30Gigs
Writely
Simpy
Gtalkr

Vizu lets you create and share polls, both on the Vizu site, via RSS feeds or on your blog or website. I like it, but not as much as Dpoll.

Digg is a wildly popular, user driven site that allows users to link to and vote on internet blog posts and news stories. It has huge mindshare and I greatly admire the technology, but I've found that I don't always like finding my content in an American Idol fashion.

Del.icio.us is a very popular social bookmark manager. I use it all the time.

Omnidrive is an online storage and backup service. The good, it's based in Australia. The bad, it's been in invitation only beta forever.

AlmondRocks says its the fastest blog reader in the world. It wasn't as slow as some of the ones I've tried, but it wasn't greased lightning either.

Tagyu is some sort of tagging serive. I put newsome.org in the text box and it came back with mycomments, feedlounge and inbound. Two of those are tags I use a Del.icio.us, but the other is pretty random.

30Gigs is a free online email application that gives you 30G of storage. They are "in the 2nd stage of our best test."

Writely is an free online word processor which recently was bought by Google. It probably has the most mindshare in the space, but that assumes people want an online word processor.

Simpy is a social bookmarking service, that lets you save, tag, search and share bookmarks and notes.

Gtalkr let's you access your Gtalk IM application from anywhere. I thought you could already do this. They need to put something on the main page that describes exactly what this application does.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

5 out of 10.

And the Winner of Round 16 is:

I'd pick Del.icio.us because I find it so useful, but you can't factor in prospects for success to any degree and not pick Digg. So Digg it is.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

Just when the buzz from the last exclusive blogoparty party finally faded out, we get to read about another insiders party that precious few of us are likely to be invited to.

The blogospats didn't do it. The gatekeeper business didn't do it. But if I have to read story after story about another exclusive party where invitations are handed out from the very in-crowd to the semi-in crowd, I just might have to follow Scoble's lead and take a Memeorandum hiatus.

While I think the idea of Web 2.0 awards is generally a good one, the true point of this party will be known when the voting panel and invitation criteria are known.

I hope this is more about awarding the companies than awarding the invitees.

Technorati Tags:
web 2.0, blogging

It's time for Round 15 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14

Here are the contestants for Round 15:

Chatsum
Pandora
LookLater
30 Boxes
Webjay
Plazes
Noodly
Wondir
Diigo
Squishr
Jots
Xdrive
Blummy

Chatsum is a free add-on for your web browser that lets you chat with all the other Chatsum users that are looking at the same website as you, sort of like Yakalike.

Pandora is an online music service that helps you discover other great music. I wrote about it here.

LookLater is a private on-line bookmark and information archive.

30 Boxes is...is...is...another online calendar. A lot of people whose opinions I respect really like it, so it must be good. My hunch is that it will own the non-integrated (meaning not part of Outlook, Yahoo, etc.) calendar space.

Webjay is a tool that helps you listen to and publish web playlists of songs you like. It looks like you can browse for and stream playlists created by other people. Cool idea, but I'm sure the RIAA will object.

Plazes is a social navigation system that lets you find people and places near you. You can search for wi-fi networks and other stuff.

Noodly says it's a "new service harnessing the power of user-generated content." It's not live yet.

Wondir is a place where you can ask questions, sort of like the now-retired Ask Jeeves. It didn't know "how cool is Kent Newsome?" (which may be an answer in and of itself), but it did know where Cheraw, SC is. Pretty cool, but couldn't this be found via Google just as fast?

Diigo is a social bookmarking service that focuses on "social annotation." It's an invitation only beta, and I don't have an invite, so that's all I can tell you about it.

Squishr has no information about itself on its page. It's not live. Someone tell me why these sites are tossed up there before there's anything to see or read? These logo only sites are the new "Under Construction."

Jots is a collaborative bookmarking system. Users can store links and choose whether to make them private, share them with with a select group of people or share them with the world.

Xdrive is a popular online file storage and backup service. 5G of storage costs $10 a month.

Blummy is a bookmarklet manager. If I used a ton of bookmarklets, I'd give it a try. Neat idea.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

5 out of 13.

And the Winner of Round 15 is:

Pandora, because both the theory and the execution really amaze me.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

We got up early and took a hay ride to a great breakfast. On the way, we saw about a hundred deer. Later the big kids did a trail ride while the little kids rode ponies.

After lunch we went fishing. No luck, but it was still fun.

The big girls went back to ride their horses some more, while Luke takes a nap and daddy checks his email.

One of the old school, larger than life lawyers I learned from as a young guy trying to make my mark in the legal profession used to begin his opening statement for every trial the same way. He'd talk about the way his grandmother cooked pancakes. First one side and then the other. And that even though the pancake looked ready to eat after the first side was cooked, the pancake wasn't finished until you'd dealt with both sides.

That is a down-home, connect with the jury way to say that there are two sides to every story.

Of course long before my mentor ever got to the courtroom to deliver that opening statement, he had sized up his client to determine how good and sympathetic a witness he or she would make in front of the jury. Sometimes an unsympathetic witness can make even a case where the facts are favorable a dicey proposition.

It's easy to march into court, be it of law or public opinion, when you have the facts on your side and a client the jury will love. When one of both of those aren't the case, things get harder. The stakes go up. And you start to see what the lawyer is made of.

I remember many years ago a good friend of mine did something that while technically appropriate was very unpopular and perhaps a little shortsighted in the context of a business relationship. Consequently, he made a lot of people mad at him. Even people who didn't know him or the actual facts began criticizing him publicly. A few other guys and I sort of shook our collective heads and lined up in support of him, if not necessarily his actions. We suffered our fair share of abuse as a result. We did it because he was an old and dear friend of ours and supporting him, even when he did something that we might have wished he hadn't done, was more important than the reactions of his detractors.

I promised to stop writing about Dave Winer. Because even though he looks from afar to be in full self-destruct mode, there are at least two sides to the story and likely many more than that. Additionally, I have some friends who are close to him and I chose to stand down for that reason as well.

So when you see a post like this from Scoble. When you see words of encouragement from Doc. And when you see Nick Bradbury lament the mob mentality, you have to understand only one thing.

These guys see one of their real world friends getting attacked. They are standing up for their friend even though doing so will subject them to some of the same enmity that is being directed at Dave. The easy thing to do would have been to join in the bashing. They made the hard choice to stand by their friend.

I don't know who's right or wrong, and neither do most of the people weighing in on the matter. But I respect what Scoble and these other guys are doing. I hope my friends would do the same.

Technorati Tags:
rss, blogospats

It's time for Round 14 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

Here are the contestants for Round 14:

Gabbr
Gcast
Blinkx
Openomy
Riffs
ajchat
Blogger
Jambo
Protopage
Rollyo
Alexa

Gabbr is a social news community. It's a little like Digg, a little like Delicious and a little like Tailrank.

Gcast is a free podcast creation and hosting site. It contains tools that let you create your podcast online. I haven't used it, but it looks pretty comprehensive.

Blinkx is a multi-format searching and organization application.

Openomy is an online storage service. It uses tagging to identify and organize stored files.

Riffs is a social recommendation site. You can recommend and review all the things you like and don't like, and to find others who share your interests.

ajchat is a simple online chat system which uses Ajaz.

Blogger is a free blog creation and hosting service. I use it to publish this blog, though my files are hosted on my own server.

Jambo is a social wi-fi service that allows users to locate people who share similar interests, etc. via wi-fi.

Protopage is a free personal portal, similar to Netvibes and Pageflakes. It looks pretty nice. One of my favorite personal portals so far.

Rollyo lets you create your own custom search engine. Sadly, the one I created tells me that neither Scoble, Om, Steve nor I have ever written anything about cat juggling (until right now). Shame on us.

Alexa is a search engine.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

4 out of 11.

And the Winner of Round 14 is:

I've got to go with Blogger, simply because it helps so many people join the blogosphere.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

We made it to Bandera, and my Verizon wireless is working. Barely, but it's working.

We're off to a barbecue. More later, maybe.

We're about to leave for Bandera, Texas, where we'll be horseback riding, fishing and having fun for the next few days.

Assuming any kind of internet access is available, I'll be posting some late at night, after the kids hit the hay.

If I catch any fish worth bragging about I guarantee you I'll figure out a way to post a photo or two.

This is the another installment in my series of favorite records. The list so far is here.

One of my favorite country rock bands of the early 70's was Goose Creek Symphony. Although named for a place in Kentucky, the band was actually formed in Phoenix and played a San Francisco-influenced country rock sound.

Any of their first three records could have made my list, but I'm going to pick their first one.

Among the many great songs on Established 1970 are Charlie's Tune, the first Goose Creek song I ever heard and still one of my favorites, a fantastic version of Satisfied Mind, Confusion, the excellent and Band-like Raid on Bush Creek and Talk About Goose Creek.

All of these songs are fantastic. Their next two records, Words of Earnest and Welcome to Goose Creek, are also excellent.

In the trivia department, the fiddle player's wife was the maid of honor at my sister's wedding in College Grove, Tennessee in 1976. Small world.

Goose Creek and The Amazing Rhythm Aces, along with Area Code 615 and its offspring, Barefoot Jerry, were among my favorite bands of the early 70's- and they still are today.

Technorati Tags:
top 50 albums, record reviews

I have finshed my review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

Here are the alphabetical posts: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z.

Here are all the winners:

A blog doesn't need a clever name (RSS feed)
Ask Dave Taylor! (RSS feed)

Bernie DeKoven's FunLog (RSS Feed)

Conversations with Dina (RSS Feed)

Dare Obasanjo (RSS Feed)
Down the Avenue (RSS Feed)

eHomeUpgrade (RSS Feed)

Feld Thoughts (RSS Feed)

Greg Hughes - dot - net (RSS Feed)

HorsePigCow (RSS Feed)

iBLOGthere4iM (RSS Feed)

J-Walk Blog (RSS Feed)
Jake Ludington's MediaBlab (RSS Feed)

Knowing.Net (RSS Feed)

Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey (RSS Feed)
The Long Tail (RSS Feed)

Maryamie (RSS Feed)
Manufactured Environments (RSS Feed)
Marc's Voice (RSS Feed)

Neopoleon.com (RSS Feed)
Neowin.net (RSS Feed)
New Media Musings (RSS Feed)

Overdo's Land of Nothingness (RSS Feed)

Portals and KM (RSS Feed)
ProgrammableWeb (RSS Feed)

Ratcliffe Blog (RSS Feed)
Raw (RSS Feed)
Rexblog (RSS Feed)

Simon Speight (RSS Feed)
Seth Godin's Blog (RSS Feed)

Things that Make You Go Hmmm (RSS Feed)
This is Jordon Cooper's Weblog (RSS Feed)

Unmediated (RSS Feed)

We-Make-Money-Not-Art (RSS Feed)
Web Pages that Suck (RSS Feed)


And here are the honorable mentions (recall that any blog I already read was ineligible to win, but received an honorable mention, along with a few others):

A VC (RSS Feed)
A Welsh View (RSS Feed)
Addicted to Digital Media

Blog Maverick (RSS Feed)
BoingBoing (RSS Feed)
A View from the Isle (RSS Feed)

Cyberspace People Watcher (RSS Feed)
Chris Brooks (RSS Feed)

Doc Searls (RSS Feed)
Dan Gillmor's eJournal (RSS Feed)

Ed Bott (RSS Feed)
Engadget (RSS Feed)
Ernie the Attorney (RSS Feed)
Evil Genius Chronicles (RSS Feed)

Flickr Blog (RSS Feed)
FuzzyBlog (RSS Feed)

Gizmodo (RSS Feed)
Global Voices (RSS Feed)

Incremental Blogger (RSS Feed)
Inside Microsoft (RSS Feed)
Ian Dixon (RSS Feed)

JKOnTheRun (RSS Feed)
Jason Calacanis Weblog (RSS Feed)

Kottke.Org (RSS Feed)
Kevin Schofield's Weblog (RSS Feed)
Kiruba Shankar (RSS Feed)

Longhorn Blogs (RSS Feed)

Memeorandum (RSS Feed)
Micro Persuasion (RSS Feed)

Naill Kennedy's Weblog (RSS Feed)

Om Malik on Broadband (RSS Feed)

Performancing (RSS Feed)
PVR Blog (RSS Feed)
Paul's Down-Home Page (RSS Feed)
Podcasting News (RSS Feed)

Scobleizer (RSS Feed)
Sifry's Alerts (RSS Feed)
Solution Watch (RSS Feed)
Scripting News (RSS Feed)

Techcrunch (RSS Feed)
Tech.Memeorandum (RSS Feed)
Techdirt (RSS Feed)
Thomas Hawk (RSS Feed)

Unofficial Apple Weblog (RSS Feed)

Unaffiliated sites number in the hundreds...
- Batman (Justice League)

As promised, Darren Rowse has posted the second part of his blog network series today, this time covering the reasons why a blogger might not want to join a blog network. I addressed his reasons why yesterday, in the context of some overtures I received from a couple of blog networks.

Let's take a look at his reasons why not.

1) Revenue Split

I discussed this yesterday. Revenue complications are a major negative to the decision.

2) Ownership/Rights

I didn't even think about this, but I should have. I publish a lot in the real world and, except for the one-off newspaper article, I always reserve the rights to my work and grant the publication a license to use it. I wouldn't consider a blog network unless I retained all of the rights to my work here.

If I post a guest article on another blog, that's one thing, but content here is off-limits as far as network ownership goes.

Definitely negative to the decision.

3) Reputation

Much like a real world association, a network member would be affected by the actions, good and bad, of other network members. Since it is unlikely that you would know all of the other network members well, this is an issue with respect to blog networks.

Of course a lot of risks could be addressed via a network-wide acceptable content policy, that could not be changed without the consent of all or a large percentage of the members.

I could write around this problem (via the aforementioned policy), so it's only mildly negative to the decision.

4) Loss of Control

I talked about this yesterday as well. I need less administration in my life, not more. Negative to the decision.

5) Risk

This gets down to how hard or easy it would be to get out of the deal if things changed that made me uncomfortable with the direction of the network. As a musician, I often tell my musician friends that the only thing I found harder than getting signed to my first publishing deal was getting out of that same deal.

I could write around this too (via escape clauses should certain things happen), but it's still negative to the decision.

6) Legalities and Responsibilities

This would not be a problem for me, given my day job, but I strongly suggest that anyone who is thinking about signing a network affiliation agreement have it reviewed by a lawyer. I have signed many network affiliation agreements with regard to my websites and if blog network agreements are similar (and I bet they are), they are one-sided and need to be negotiated to be fair to the blogger.


Darren says that, the issues notwithstanding, he is happy to be part of a network and believes it has helped him grow his blog, both traffic and profit-wise.

Blog networks may the just what the doctor ordered for some blogs. And I'm not ruling them out as far as my blog goes. Not now, but maybe later.

But proceed with caution, because blog networks and the agreements used to create and administer the same can have a tremendous effect on your blog and your blogging.

The secret is to maximize the positive effect while reducing the potential negative effect.

This is part twenty-four through twenty-six of my A-Z review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I've already done A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V and W

There are very few X's, Y's and Z's and I didn't find any that knocked my socks off. So after four months and 78 winners and honorable mentions, we're done.

I have really enjoyed writing this series, and I've found a lot of good blogs to read. Stay tuned for a comprehensive list of all the winners and honorable mentions.

In a week or two, I'll start my next blog discovery project. Stay tuned!

Phase I: the 80's

My wife missed my first computer phase, back in the mid-eighties, when I had an IBM clone (that's the exact computer I had), wrote shareware computer games and pulled many all-nighters playing Starflight. When we got married in 1993, I didn't even have a computer at home. I started fooling around with her 386 and got the bug again.

Phase II: the 90's

When I first started developing web sites back in the mid-nineties, my wife thought I had lost my mind. She thought the early version of Newsome.Org was mildly interesting because it had a lot of family photos and related content, but she thought all the sports and gadget related sites I was doing were just a way for me to spend more geek time on the computer. I can't count on all my hands and feet the times we'd be at dinner with friends and someone would say "did you know Kent has a web page?" People would chuckle and I'd feel the compelled to change the subject by talking about some duck I killed or some dove I shot. Birds sacrificial to my manliness.

Then my web sites started making a little money. I took every opportunity to remind her and our friends that "Kent's little web page" actually made $50 last month. That was a meal out, with change. So over time she sort of accepted that there was an element of business to my internet endeavors.

Then Bubble 1.0 started, and that $50 turned into $500 and then $5,000 and then $10,000. All of the sudden those little web pages were, in the eyes of some, a business. People came out of the woodwork wanting to buy them. I sold some, almost sold the crown jewel (Bubble 1.0 burst before I got the lion's share of the purchase price) and generally felt vindicated as far as my web development activities went.

I kept a low profile after Bubble 1.0 burst, licking my wounds and trying not to look at my bombed out stock portfolio.

Phase III: the 00's

Then came the blogging revolution. At first, I was merely an observer. Then I moved Newsome.Org to a blogging platform because it made it easier to manage content. Shortly thereafter, I jumped in and began to participate. It's a long, uphill climb, but over time I have made progress in building Newsome.Org.

Like everyone else, when my wife found out I had turned Newsome.Org into a blog, she thought I was keeping an online diary. More dinner conversation and chuckles soon followed.

Over time, however, she began to realize what a blog in general and this blog in particular encompasses. When I began to participate in the conversations between some of the more well known bloggers, she was a little impressed.

And she was very excited when she heard Steve Rubel speak favorably about Newsome.Org in a podcast. Thanks again, Steve. That one statement validated everything I'm trying to do here, at least in my wife's very important eyes. You need friends in the blogosphere, just like you do in the real world.

So I keep doing my thing while my wife watches out of the corner of her eye.

I have showed her some of the web sites I find so compelling. Wikipedia, Flickr, Tailrank, Megite, and my New York Times, Memeorandum. When I first started showing up on Memeorandum, I called her into my study to show her. I explained to her the way it gathers and displays tech-related topics from all over. She gave me the requisite encouragement and went about her business. Because she, like most of the people I know, just doesn't care about tech. If it makes her life easier, she'll use it, but that's about as far as it goes.

This is Not Your Father's Memeorandum

But now Gabe has done something brilliant.

We knew he was going to do another Memeorandum at some point. He mentioned food on a podcast one time, I was hoping for music and/or movies, others had their wishlist. But he did something much smarter.

He did WeSmirch, a Memeorandum for celebrity gossip. A self perpetuating People Magazine. Something that will capture an entirely different market.

This is brilliant for two reasons.

First, he didn't cannibalize his current tech and politics user base. Sure, there will be lots of people who'll read more than one of his memetrackers, but not as many as there would have been had he done something closer to tech, gadgets, etc.

Second, he will attract a ton of new users, like my wife, who are bored with politics and don't care about tech. In this Web 2.0 world, eyeballs are the currency, and Gabe has a knack for making eyeballs.

My wife could care less if Amazon enters the online storage business. But she'll be interested in some of the stuff that will show up on WeSmirch.

I can't wait to tell her about it.

It seems Fox Interactive has acquired Newroo, a Web 2.0 application for "less than $10 million." That's million, not thousand. I'd tell you more about Newroo, except, well, the thing is it hasn't even launched yet.

While $0 is technically "less than $10 million," unless someone is being intentionally deceptive, you have to assume the number is reasonably close to $10 million. At a minimum, in the several million dollar range.

Mike Arrington says it's a "small acquisition" for Fox.

One Commenter describes Newroo as "Memeorandum for the masses," which is similar to the way Mike described it earlier. So users can pull content from a lot of other sites into a custom content aggregation page. That's pretty neat, but a lot of other sites do this right now- My Yahoo, Google and Tailrank to name a few.

Maybe Newroo does it better, but $10 million dollars better?

The revenue model is, of course, ad-based, with the presentation of Amazon affiliate links for items related to the news that displays on the user's page. The plan is to "eventually" share this revenue with the users who create the pages.

When big companies start buying unreleased technology with no meaningful revenue sources for multiple millions of dollars and referring to it as a small purchase, you can be sure the bubble is rising.

As long as these mega-companies are spending their own money, no worries. Condition red will occur when we start hearing words like IPO and spin-off.

Stay tuned.

Stowe Boyd nails the whole noisy blogosphere thing. He says it perfectly. There's nothing I can add so let me quote reverently one passage:

It has become the conventional wisdom to reel off those sorts of pronouncements in conference halls and hallways, and lament the loss of... what, exactly? A halcyon era when the front page of the regional paper and the news anchors on the three major channels fed us their take on the news? A simpler, more bucolic blogosphere a few years back when only a few hundred people were posting?

And his conclusion is even better.

Stowe's post has my vote for post of the year so far. Go read it.

I have a lot of thoughts about Scoble's overwhelmed post. Yet I buy a little of what Seth Godin said yesterday about restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity. I know brevity is not my strongest quality, so I need to engineer at least some into Newsome.Org.

So I'm going to start a new thing. 30 Seconds On. My quick take on something I read somewhere that moves me to respond.

30 Seconds on: Scoble's Overwhelmed Post.

1) I agree that marketing done wrong (shotgunned emails in search of a shortcut that doesn't exist) is clogging the blogosphere. Spam clogs the internet. Just ignore them both.

2) Part of Dave's post is yet another blogotantrum because he can't control whatever it is he wants to control. In other words, while he may have some valid points, to an extent he made his own bed.

3) No one made you the gatekeeper, Robert; you became one via your hard work, position, timing, etc. Would you really like it better if you were blogging away in obscurity? Let me answer for you- no. We wouldn't like it either because we want you to converse with us, not just read.

4) I wish I'd heard that Jimmy Wales speech. Reading about it makes me dig Wikipedia even more.

Well, ain't it a small world, spiritually speaking.
Pete and Delmar just been baptized and saved.
I guess I'm the only one that remains unaffiliated.
- Ulysses Everett McGill

Darren Rowse has a post today explaining why a blogger should consider joining a blog network.

I have written before on blog networks, and have actually had a couple of inquiries from networks wondering if I was interested in joining one. Because I was flattered by the interest, I thought about it some.

I asked myself what a blog network could do for Newsome.Org and, more importantly, what Newsome.Org could do for it. Until you join a group, human nature dictates that the issue is all about getting in. Insiders know that once you're in, many other issues arise around staying in and keeping everyone happy.

It's not an easy decision.

Let's take a look at Darren's reasons in favor of networks and see how they might apply to a reasonably popular independent blog.

1) Relationships

This is the great double-edged sword of the network question. Certainly, you would build and cement relationships with those in your network, but you might also chill your relationships with those in other or no networks.

I ultimately concluded that this was a wash. Partly positive and partly negative to the decision.

2) Traffic

This is the primary reason I considered pursuing a network affiliation. We have talked it to death, but for most bloggers, traffic is one of the goals. Traffic equals readers equals comments equals conversations, etc.

Definitely positive to the decision.

3) Expertise

Darren says, correctly, that a network relationship can give you the benefit of the other members' expertise in blog building, etc. I didn't think about it in exactly that way- for me it was more about finding some cool, smart people to travel through the blogosphere with. Sort of an extension of my wagon train concept.

Mildly positive to the decision.

4) Administration

I definitely thought about this, and it was negative to the decision. I have too much administration in my life already and I'm reasonably tech-proficient. The last thing I want is to have to remake my page in the image of some network look and feel. Granted, I'm sure some networks are more flexible than others in this regard, but it is something I want to mostly avoid.

5) Revenue

This is the biggest issue in the network question. I am not blogging to make money. I may one day have some text ads to help pay the server costs, etc. and if anyone wants to throw some money at me, I'll probably take it. But it is absolutely not the reason I write. Plus, of course, the network takes a cut of that revenue, which raises all sorts of other complicated issues. If I ever join a network, it probably won't be because of the revenue factor. In fact, it would likely be in spite of it.

Revenue complications are a big negative to the decision.

6) Search Engine Optimization

If you get permanent links from other network blogs, you may move up the search result pages. I find SEO for SEO sake a little creepy. Traffic is good and I want it, but I'd rather let it come naturally. SEO is not something I thought about, and it would not be a factor should I ever join a network.

Neither positive nor negative to the decision.

7) Prestige

I thought about this more than I would have expected to. I am, in theory, completely unconcerned with prestige, yet there it was- leading me to think long and hard about a possible network affiliation.

I'm not proud about it, but the prestige factor was a mildly positive to the decision.

8) Learning

Darren mentions that you can learn a lot, about writing and blogging, by being part of a network. I suspect you can, but you can probably learn just as much from reading all sorts of blogs, both network and non-network.

Neither positive nor negative to the decision.


At the end of the day, I didn't pursue any network opportunities. That's not to say I never will, but for the time being it doesn't seem to make sense to join a network.

Darren promises a future article on why not to join a blog network. I'll take a similar look at that post when its published.

That whacking sound heard throughout the blogosphere today is the sound of Amazon whacking Google and the rest of the online storage players about the head. Amazon has released a very inexpensive online storage service that some are saying will change the online storage game.

First, the good. The service is very inexpensive. $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used and $.20 per GB-month of data transferred.

So lets say someone wants to host all their data with Amazon and serve it to their web page. Maybe 20 GB of data and 30 GB of bandwidth (transfer). That's $3.00 per month for the storage plus $6.00 for the bandwidth, for a total of $9.00 a month. That's an almost unbelievable price.

I signed up early this morning, and will play around with the service this weekend and report my impressions.

But this is not the GDrive and Box.Net killer some are saying it is.

Because this service is in no way, shape or form designed for the consumer to back up his or her data or media files. It is aimed at developers.

To consumers, FTP is hard enough. Soap is for the shower and rest is what you do when you're tired. So while developers will find Amazon's service irresistible, consumers will still look to other consumer-oriented services that make the management of online storage easier and more intuitive.

And of course by consumers, I also mean small and medium businesses without a dedicated IT department.

So while I'm excited about Amazon's new service, let's not get too carried away about its effect on the consumer online storage industry.

I come from a people and place where farming has been part job and part culture for as long as I can remember. Yes, I sold out and moved to the big city, and I am not without a little guilt about that. Particularly since my personal philosophy is more grounded in driving a combine than pushing paper around.

To keep some small grip on my past and my sanity, I read a few farming publications, Farmgate being one of them.

As we have talked about seeding a blog with good content, nurturing the conversations that build on such content, growing an internet presence and harvesting the bounty thereof, I have thought many times that blogging is not unlike farming in the planning and execution stages.

Yesterday, Farmgate post an article entitled Are You Planting for Today, or for the Future?

It makes many good points that apply to blog building just as much as farming. Here are some quotes followed by a discussion of how these concepts might apply to blog building:

If you make the change to more soybean acres, are you doing it "“because that is the thing to do?" ” Are you doing it because energy and production costs have risen for corn? And if you are making the change, are you trying to escape costs, and let revenue fall where it may? Are you looking at the end of the marketing year, as well as the start of the production season?

When we decide what topics we want to cover and how we want to cover them, we have to look beyond the here and now. We have to think about how things will look, and sell, later. Once we've written hundreds of posts, what will our blog look like. Will there by discernible theme? Will there be sufficient topic rotation to keep the ideas fresh and useful? Will there be a market for what we write? How many other bloggers are out there growing the very same thing? Can they produce the same crops more easily? Are they closer to the relevant markets, such that their transportation costs are less?

I am a visual person. From back in my sports days to my music days to my lawyering days and my writing days, I like to imagine the outcome of my actions. It's a cliche I suppose, but it comes naturally to me and I do it all the time. I visualize my blog as rotating fields in the ground that is my part of the blogosphere, with a healthy crop of articles, ideas, conversation and humor. Too much of one makes the ground less fertile. Sometimes when nothing grows in one of the fields I let it lie empty for a while.

The educated folks at several universities in the Cornbelt want you to consider what will likely be complexion of the market, before you make any final and unalterable decisions by putting seed in the ground.

What sounds good in theory may not work all that well when put into practice. Things like breaking news topics, blogospats that disrupt the conversation flow, conferences that demand the attention of attendees and a horde of other weather-like factors affect how well your crops grow. You can't always predict these things, but you have to plan for them by taking the long view. If you write a good post and it gets lost in the mix because of a big story, it will get discovered later. And even if it doesn't, you've got other crops in other fields.

While planting decisions remain with the producer, those decisions should be made with the help of knowing the potential marketing outcome of the decision, and not just information based on production costs.

As I said in my 10/90 post, how easy or hard something is to write is not an accurate predictor of what will get noticed in the blogosphere. To get sold there needs to be a market. So what if I wrote one lengthy post about mobile technology, others have entire blogs full of more knowledgable and better written posts. You have to take the long view.

You lose some crops and sometimes you have bad spells (like this past weekend, when the blogosphere was a slow as freeze dried molasses), but over time good planning, good planting and good crop management will lead to good production.

It's as true in the blogosphere as it is on the farm.

It's time for Round 13 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants, pairing logic and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12

Here are the contestants for Round 13:

Bloop
ProjectSpaces
FeedBurner
Bloglines
Purevolume
Fotolog
Ourmedia
Yub
Spot Runner
Myspace
News Alloy
Allmydata

Bloop couldn't be found. Disqualified.

ProjectSpaces is a password protected web-based extranet application that lets groups collaborate securely over the internet.

FeedBurner burns and distributes RSS feeds of blogs and other web content. I use it and so does almost everyone I know.

Bloglines is an online RSS feed reader. It allows you to clip and store blog posts you want to refer to later and share your blogrolls and other content via a bloglines hosted blog. It is my primary feed reader, but based on my experience customer support is close to non-existent.

Purevolume is a service that lets independent artists upload MP3s. You can browse by location or by genre. It looks sort of like what MP3.Com was back before MP3.Com sucked.

Fotolog is a photo storage and sharing site, with an interconnected photo blog approach.

Ourmedia A audio, video content storage and sharing site. Nice, well designed service, but isn't online video storage becoming a commodity?

Yub is an online mall where you can hang out if your parents won't drive you to the real mall.

Spot Runner Sells TV ads. It says you can get your business on ESPN for $44. OK I want one Newsome.Org add on Sportscenter each week. If TV ads are this cheap, Spot Runner should be huge.

Myspace is, well, Myspace. I don't get it, but millions of people do.

News Alloy is an online RSS feed reader.

Allmydata is an online file storage and backup service.


Before Today I'd Heard of:

4 out of 12.

And the Winner of Round 13 is:

I'd love to pick FeedBurner, but there's no way not to pick Myspace. I don't get it, but millions do.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

Seth Godin, obviously having read and taken to heart some of the words of old what's his name, steps forward with his take on the noisy blogosphere.

As those rocky places where many of our words could find no purchase (I can cut loose with my own brand of literary reference every once in a while) fall away before the flattening forces of the citizen media movement (alliteration and pretense- put me in coach, I'm ready), the once ordered nature of the blogosphere becomes the cacophony of the masses (I'm in the zone; is it me writing these words or Nick Carr?).

The result is too many voices competing for too few ears. A situation Seth compares to the tragedy of the commons. The real tragedy for common folks, of course, is that none of us have any idea what that is. So I took one for the team and looked it up for us.

It's a parable, sort of like the ones Jesus and Andy Griffith used to tell.

Between those two great parable tellers came some guy named William Forster Lloyd (he has three names so you know he was smart; four names means you're both smart and rich). He told a story that was later told by Garrett Hardin in Science magazine.

The parable uses a lot of fancy words to say that if a lot of people compete for the use of a shared resource (be it a grazing pasture, a fishing pond or the blogosphere), the end result is overuse, which is bad for everyone. It's the smart guys' version of the prisoner's dilemma.

The end result for the blogosphere, according to Seth, is that to save it we have to use it differently. The autonomous collective (the literary references keep on coming) different- through restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (which is what Seth manifestly advocates). Or the feudal different- with the lords within the castle and the fiefs without (which he doesn't mention directly, but it's the blogosphere's zoning and paper equivalent).

Asking the citizenry of the blogosphere (far too many of whom are chasing the almighty dollar) to be reasoned in their use of the shared blogosphere is like asking people not to litter.

Those of us who are willing not to litter are already not littering. Others will turn a deaf ear to the plea, even while remorsefully tossing a candy wrapper out the window.

So if we know the autonomous collective approach is doomed to failure, what is left?

That is the question.

Update: Scott Karp says the answer is more metadata and better filters.

Bucking the forever beta trend, Zoli released Zoli 3.0 today.

The developer claims it is a stable, final release product.

Zoli 3.o will likely send shockwaves throughout the online application industry with its speed to market and its offer to give every user a free upgrade to Zoli 3.5 when released.

See the official Zoli Site for features and Release Notes.

OK, here it comes.

The more I fool around with Second Life, the more amazing I think it is- both from an immersive experience point of view and from a business plan point of view. I found myself itching to go back there while I was trying to get some work done this past weekend. And I have never even talked to anyone in the game.

I just walk (or fly) around and look at stuff. I even bought a little land this weekend.

That's where the business plan part comes in. You can create an avatar and participate in the world for free, but if you want to own land (for a home or a business) you have to upgrade to a subscription (less than $10 a month). Plus, you have to buy currency to buy things you need.

Smart. Smart. Smart.

There are a couple of problems that I feel compelled to point out (paging Pathfinder Linden):

1) While the help files are good at getting you started on the basics, it is very, very hard to build stuff. I wanted to add some walls, etc. to my newly purchased house and I finally gave up. It may be easy once you do it, but it's hard if you haven't.

2) There needs to be more obvious help in setting up a business space. I finally found some houses for sale and bought one. But I really wanted to set up shop in one of those highrise condos not far from Scoble's building. Most of them were empty and perhaps all of them are owned, but I couldn't tell one way or the other. And I saw not a clue how to buy one. And those old building beside Scoble's building. Are those owned by someone or for sale? Granted, I didn't spend hours trying to figure it out. But if I'm going to set up a Newsome.Org office over there, I need some fancy digs.

3) Why are there limitations on the name of your avatar. Granted, you have to filter out bad words, but why can't I use whatever name I want. I want to be Billy Pilgrim, not Ezra Snickerdoodle.

Otherwise, it's scary how compelling the Second Life experience is. Even for an old man like me.

I can do it too folks. I haven't already, in any sense, but I can.

Here are the reasons why I will:

1) It's too hard trying to figure out what's really bugging Dave. I'm not sure he even knows exactly. But reading a blog that purports to describe a problem shouldn't be a puzzle-like experience. Puzzles just compound the problem.

2) Everything doesn't have to be a line in the sand or olive branch. Can't we just talk about stuff and if we don't agree, so what?

3) I like being talked to, not at. Old school web sites were at. The blogosphere is at least to, if not with.

4) Mathew Ingram has already got it covered.

5) I don't think Dave wants to be a part of the blogging culture. He says he does, but I don't buy it. I think he's the farmer and we're the ants. I don't mind being an ant as long as I don't know I'm an ant.

6) He's a friend of Doc Searls, so under the doctrine of respect transitivity I don't want to be viewed as overly critical. A friend of someone I respect gets the benefit of the doubt in the real world, and so should it in the blogosphere.

7) I'm sort of paranoid too, so we're not good for each other.

8) I don't want to pile on, even if I sort of agree that a lot of us (and I include me in us) tend to take ourselves a bit too seriously, given that most people have never heard of us and most of the ones who have think we're nerds. I realize that Dave is far more than just some blogger in the vast blogosphere, but, his accomplishments notwithstanding, he is, at least for now, a blogger in the vast blogosphere.

9) Maybe all the erie silence will bring Scoble back to Memeorandum. Reading RSS feeds and reading memetrackers don't have to be mutually exclusive.

10) And of course, if he quits blogging, there won't be anything new to try to decipher and write about.

I've said it here many times. I read Dave's blog every day and I enjoy his directness. I'm not trying to pile on or be critical of him as a person in any way. I am talking about the act of walking away, not the person doing the walking.

The blogosphere is a big sandbox, not a classroom. When the teacher wanders onto the playground, the sandbox is still the sandbox. The only question is do you jump in and have fun or walk away shaking your head.

This is part twenty-three of my A-Z review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I've already done A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U and V

A good selection of W's and here are my favorites:

We-Make-Money-Not-Art (RSS Feed)

Web Pages that Suck (RSS Feed)

We-Make-Money-Not-Art is simply a great blog. I can't believe I hadn't seen it before. It covers everything, and well.

Web Pages that Suck is a site that features bad web design. Anybody else remember Mirsky's Worst of the Web from back in the day?

Honorable Mention:

None

This is part twenty-two of my A-Z review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I've already done A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T and U.

There are very few V's and I didn't find one that knocked my socks off. So no V.

There are lots of good W's so I'll post that installment right now.

Steve Rubel makes a good point about gatekeeping in a flat world.

Everyone's a gatekeeper- not for keeping people out, but for putting information in.

Also note Amy Gahran's always interesting perspective in Steve's Comments.

Steve's post was inspired by this one by Jeff Jarvis. Jeff's post is mostly about gatekeeping in the news media and public relations context, in preparation for some radio or TV show Jeff is appearing on to talk about Walmargate.

I don't have any strong opinions one way or the other about Walmargate, other than to wonder what's so different about what Walmart did and developers wining and dining bloggers, giving them free access to products and applications, and writing emails asking a blogger to review their product that contain feature summaries (parts of which often find their way into a blog post), etc. I'm not saying that opaque is good- I'm simply saying that if transparency is required, it should be required across the board.

Anyway, there are some other things in Jeff's post that I find interesting.

Let's start with this:

The problem with gatekeepers is that they try to control, to get in the way, to keep us from getting what we want.

Sort of Jeff, but in the context of the blogosphere that's the indirect result of the bigger concern- keeping control of the microphone. Sure, that means that readers don't get content they might want, but many of them probably don't know they want it because the microphone holders fill the space pretty well.

Wanting to be the only one talking is different from wanting to be the only one being heard. The concern is not so much that a reader is getting a new perspective on an issue; it's that "someone else is trying to use my platform to be heard." It's more of a musical chairs sort of thing. If that new guy is sitting down then one of us might be standing up when the music stops. It's front end, not back end.

Again, I'm largely over the gatekeeper thing, which is why I focused on and started with Steve's flattened earth comment. There are people out there who still want to silence the new voices, but:

(a) there are less of them than I originally thought; and

(b) the flattening forces at play in the blogosphere make it very hard to keep people out of the proverbial club.

Clearly some folks have a conscious or (perhaps, but not likely) unconscious desire to withhold conversation from without their favored peer group. Jeff strongly implies he's not one of them, and I'll take him at his word.

More often than not, the lack of a response is because the intended recipient didn't see the post, as opposed to some sort of exclusionary practice. Not all the time, but more often than not.

He later updated his post to mention Steve's post and say he hopes we're not all gatekeepers. I think it's a matter of semantics.

We are gatekeepers, the same way entrance ramps are gates to the freeway.

For example, I wouldn't have heard about much of the stuff I write about if I hadn't seen a reference to it somewhere- on My Yahoo, on a blog in my reading list, in the newspaper. Someone was an entrance ramp and put that information on the - tired metaphor alert- information superhighway (ugh!).

The onramps are always open- anyone can drive.

We just need to keep working to make it like that in the blogosphere.

Eric Rice has posted the first installment in his series about Second Life. I posted a little about it the other day.

Since then I have been back a couple of times and done a little more exploring. I haven't tried to build anything yet, but I did make a little money (by dancing and then sitting in a chair by some slot machines). Of course I spent what I made and more on the slot machines, which was the idea.

I have only barely scratched the surface of the application, which is part game, part chat room and part virtual world. The first two don't really interest me, but I am intrigued by the third. The more I look around Second Life, the more impressed I am.

One thing I want to do next time is explore Second Life's music aspects. Fred Wilson found some good music stuff there.

And I still want to know if Second Life is related to that deal that AOL (or maybe it was Compuserve?) launched or almost did 10 or so years ago? See my other post for more details about that.

Uncle Scott, Aunt Kelly, Hunter and Hayden are visiting from Fort Worth on their way to Galveston for spring break.

The girls were so excited they camped out by the front door waiting for their cousins to get here. As soon as they did, it was into bathing suits and off the big wall.

If there's anything I understand less than all these conferences and unconferences and all the fuss over who gets to speak and who doesn't, it's the thinktank. I imagine it as a gathering of navel gazers, with a big dose of arrogance thrown in.

So all these brainiacs are sitting around thinking about the next mensa convention, when all of the sudden the silence is broken by a high pitched, nasal sound.

Brainiac One: "I've got it! Everyone else in the world who thinks that net neutrality is a good idea is wrong! Net neutrality is bad! Yeah, that's it. Bad. Bad, I tell you!"

Brainiac Two: "Well, if everyone says it's good and we say it's good too, then what good is our thinktank?"

Brainiac Three: "Good point, Rothschild, we must do out part to eradicate net neutrality. Let's all think about how we can do that."

[hours and hours of tense silence]

Brainiac Two: "I have it! Let's write a report that says net neutrality is stealing! Let's throw some words in there like regulatory and infrastructure, and, if possible, a few latin phrases."

Brainiac One: "Yes, if we publish said report, people will talk about it and they will bow down before our tiding."

Janitor (who has a masters degree, but not mutliple PhD's) [looks up from sweeping the floor]: "Yeah, and that there will also compy with that durned old Rule of the Reallies becaus'n some o' dose idgits will thunk it's wrong!"

Brainiac Three: "Harcourt, go take out the trash and let us smart guys do the thinking. Besides, we are above publicity. It would be beneath us to take an absurd position just for the attention we would get."

Brainiac Four: "Fellows, I urge that we table this important discourse for an hour as our navels need a break."

Adam Green posts today about the conversational and sometimes reactionary nature of the internet. He makes some good points, not the least of which is the Rorschach test title and discussion, which is as humorous as it is thought provoking.

When we developed all those message board sites back during Bubble 1.0, we quickly mapped the response tendencies of our users. This is a bit of a generalization, but response patterns tend to fall into one or more of five categories:

1) The Chorus: I agree, with little additional content. These were good for page views, but didn't do much to further the conversation.

2) The Heckler: You're wrong and/or an idiot. These were even better for page views, and only helped the conversation a little by forcing a response.

3) The Critic: I think you are partly right, but what about this. These were the best replies of all, because generally they initiated a semi-thoughtful discussion and debate.

4) The Hijacker: I know you're talking about that, but what do you think about this. Things can get chaotic, but not as badly as you might think because the hijacker either fails and gets ignored or succeeds and the conversation just takes a right turn and continues, just like they sometimes do around the dinner table.

5) The Hater: I don't just want to join in- I just want to be disruptive and aggressive and attack people. These folks generally got banned from our message boards at some point.

I think those same categories largely apply to people who converse in the blogosphere, whether via Comments or cross-blog conversations, like this one.

The X-factor in these conversations, just like the ones around the dinner table, is emotion. Once you touch the emotive membrane, passion goes up and logic sometimes goes down. This is both good (more spirited conversation) and bad (the potential to miss the point and turn from a discussion to a fight).

So yes, I think sometimes people react more quickly and perhaps less logically when they are talking about something they like a lot or don't like a lot.

Now, about my reply to Adam's memetracker post.

First of all, he is exactly right when he deduces that part of my reaction was based on my feelings about committees in general. A guy I once worked with once said (loudly) that anytime someone asked him to be on a committee, he knew they were only trying to take advantage of him. Now I don't feel that way (thus I'm still here and he has moved on), but I do understand what he's saying. There's a little truth in his statement.

But the real emotive reaction that made me "just about fall over my chair trying to get a response written" is my great dislike of any process that might be designed or used (even if not designed) to let some people inside and keep others outside (paging Seth Finkelstein).

I had nightmares of some self-important advisory committee holding a secret vote to decide who could participate in the group blog- not so much as a memetracker developer, but as a user participant. I love the distributed conversations that occur naturally in the blogosphere and don't want anyone to dam the river and stop that flow.

Adam is absolutely right, however, that while I tried hard to be objective and conversational, my emotional reaction to the issue may have led me to sense trouble between the lines where there was none.

That's why it's important to read posts carefully and try to be sure you understand what someone is saying before you respond. Especially if you intend to take a strong and contrary position. People write blog posts quickly, and sometimes you can't be certain. Heck, I've gone as far as diagramming Dave Winer's sentences to try to decipher whether he's for or against the flattening of the blogosphere- and I still don't know. I'm not entirely sure he knows.

But even if I get something wrong, someone will let me know.

Because we're just talking here.

And that's what's great about blogs and the internet.

It's time for Round 12 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11

Here are the contestants for Round 12:

dPolls.com
Flickr
Ning
Ookles
Strongspace.com
ZoomInfo
Castpost
YubNub
Associated Content

dPolls.com allow you to create polls and incorporate them into your blogs and web sites. I have used dPolls a little and I like the application, though the last time I tried it the in-post polls didn't make it into my RSS feed.

Flickr is simply the best photo storage, organization and sharing site, period. It will be a tough contender in this contest, though when we get to the playoff, I am going to announce a handicapping system that will remove any affection advantage for the applications I already use a lot.

Ning lets you build your own social web applications. For example, you can create an app to let people collaborate on an online story (we had big fun doing that here back in the day). There's a lot to Ning, and I'd have to say I'm pretty impressed.

Ookles is in "stealth mode," which means it's also in disqualified mode.

Strongspace.com is an online storage and file sharing space. $8/month for 4G of space seems pretty reasonable.

ZoomInfo is a person search application. I searched for me, and found only 8 links. Granted, the first link was to my bio at my day job. But the others were old and irrelevant, and there was no link to Newsome.Org.

Castpost is a media storage and sharing site. I'm a long-time alpha tester for this service and use it to serve the videos I make, like this one. Very neat service, but Stickam is some serious competition.

YubNub is a command line for the web that lets you search specific places with a single click. For example, you could create a YubNub link that searches Amazon for books by Robert Heinlein, and you should if you like good books.

Associated Content is a site where you can upload and share your video content. It seems to be a little more selective than others, more like a content exchange site. If your content gets used, you get paid a little.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

5 out of 9.

And the Winner of Round 12 is:

Ning and Castpost could have won several heats, but they get hosed by being in the same bracket at the Round 12 winner, Flickr.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

As promised the other day, here are a couple of tech-related excerpts from the most recent edition of my RanchoCast podcast.

My take on Google Office.

My take on Nerd Camps & Dave Winer's new Memeorandum plan.

There's more tech talk and lots of good music on the full podcast.

I did a new podcast tonight.

The theme is the Young Bromberg Show. I played some great songs by Jesse Colin Young, the Youngbloods, David Bromberg, the Pixies, Dave Gleason and others.

I also talked about Google's office application initiative, why all nerd camps are not created equal and my new Sprint mobile phone.

57 minutes of country rock, classic rock, tech and blues.

Click here to listen or download.

Podzinger users can get it here.

I named this post like an Isely Brothers song. I don't know why I noticed and feel compelled to point that out, but there you go.

My original love of computers back in the 80's arose via gaming. I can't tell you how many hours I spent swapping out big floppies while playing Starflight. The first one is always special, and this still may be my favorite game of all time.

Now I love my computer because it makes me more efficient. At working, writing, communicating. There are so many things the computer helps me do better and faster.

Here is the first half of the 10 applications that help me the most.

1) Nero

Between my backup needs, my songwriting needs and my desire to take stuff with me when I go places, I use CD and DVD burning software all the time. Many years ago, I dumped that often pre-installed bloatware Easy CD Creator and started using Nero Burning Rom. Even Nero has gotten a little bloaty by adding in a bunch of ancillary stuff no one ever uses, but Nero is still the best at doing what counts. Burning CDs and DVDs.

2) J. River Media Center

I have been way into music since the late 60's. I have over 26,000 songs (all legal; none shared) on my music server. I have tried every music library manager and player in the book. Winamp (killed by AOL), MusicMatch (killed by Yahoo), Windows Media Player (actually not a bad choice), jetAudio, Real Player (bloatware) and teens of others.

And the best one by far is J. River's Media Center. It's the best for large libraries, and for network use, and for playing. I love this program and cannot understand why it doesn't get more run in the music space.

3) ACDSee

I love digital photography, and as a result I have a ton of digital photos. And the best photo organization and management program I have found is ACD System's ACDSee. The batch renaming works great, and its lossless rotating is great. I like Paint Shop Pro (in the process of being ruined by Corel) better for pure editing, but for one stop shopping, ACDSee is the answer.

4) UltraMon

The only power users who don't use two monitors on their computers are the ones who have never tried it. Nothing else, and I mean nothing, has ever increased my productivity as much as a second monitor. And UltraMon makes it even better. It allows you to move windows and maximize windows across the desktop, manage more applications with a second taskbar, use different wallpapers and screen savers and much more.

If you have multiple monitors, it's a must have.

5) PaperPort

I went to a paperless document filing system for my personal statements and data years ago. I tried all kinds of scanning programs, but the one I settled on back then and the one I still use every day is PaperPort.

It makes scanning and filing a breeze. Combine it with a scanner with an automatic document feeder and the scanning job becomes much easier. It lets you easily scan 2 sided statements and is very reliable.

These are some of my most valued applications. Tell me about yours in the Comments.

Stay tuned for Part 2 in the next day or two.

This is part twenty-one of my A-Z review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I've already done A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S and T.

Very few U's, but I found a good one:

Unmediated (RSS Feed)

Unmediated is a very well written tech-oriented blog that focuses on citizen media.

Honorable Mention:

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (RSS Feed) (would have won easily if I'd used an Apple since the 80's)

Dave and Scoble have been chatting up a storm about all of the things wrong with Memeorandum.

In last week's episode Scoble takes a hiatus and Dave says stupid newbies have ruined the Memeorandum club.

Now Dave says he has figured out how to save Memeorandum. He wants to get rid of the left column, where all the topics and discussion clusters are located, and make the right column, where the new primary story links are, the focus. He wants the new links to flow by like a river. Like a river, hmmm.

Then he says a couple of things that I find interesting and contradictory. The first:

Today I want my meme-tracker to get less discriminating. I don't want to only see the stories that most people are interested in, I want interesting stories. More offbeat stuff. And I want much more than what I'm getting.

Immediately followed by:

I want the right column to move into the middle, and get rid of what's in the left column. Once a day is enough to know what the top stories are. That's why newspapers evolved that way because when you get a newspaper everything in it is new.

Here's the problem with that. The right column that Dave likes only shows the primary story links, and none of the discussion links. The alternate viewpoints and offbeat stuff show up in the discussion links.

Under Dave's plan, you'd have to make a choice from two bad options. Maybe you take away the discussion links and you have nothing more than a rotating list of links to the same stories that currently appear in the right column- like an automated Delicious links list. That would certainly look more like a river. A boring river that has no fish in it or boats floating by. Just some links you can click on as they scroll by.

What it would also do, of course, is get rid of those pesky newbies who show up first in the discussion links.

Or perhaps all of those discussion links go into the river too and we have one huge list of links flowing by in a random and chaotic fashion. I would never read such a page, but maybe others would dig(g) it.

What makes Memeorandum work is the very thing Dave and Scoble want to get rid of- the clustered, conversational organization that allows you to find and follow many perspectives at a central, intelligently filtered location. If there are a hundred links about Origami, that's because a ton of people are talking about it.

So what's really going on here?

First off, I see very little of all the flaming Dave keeps talking about. I'm starting to think flaming might be a secret word for the rising voices of the unwashed masses who don't know enough to sit back and let the gurus run the show.

There seems to be a hidden conversation inside of the conversation. Manifest and latent. Like a dream. A dream of the good old days before the newbies started showing up.

Note to Gabe. If you want to destroy Memeorandum quickly and irreparably, Dave gives you the roadmap:

Flatten it out, get less picky, turn the ladder into a river, and I bet some of the magic comes back. I'm not sure it's right, but the only way to find out is to try it.

I defended Scoble when he got flamed. I defended Dave when he says people are mean to him because he is a celebrity (his word, but I don't quarrel with it).

But I'm starting to think a lot of this is because the voices that used to have the microphone all to themselves don't like sharing it with the rest of us.

Rick Mahn has an interesting post on the whole Google Office thing we've been talking about.

I think he's spot on that there will be a market for Google's office productivity applications based on cost alone. It's hard to beat free, and if I weren't in a profession largely based on pushing paper, I'd certainly consider using a cheaper office suite. I haven't used Writely, but Steve Rubel likes it, so it must be a good product.

But there are a couple of other issues lurking out there.

First of all, I don't think it's as much of a cost thing as it is a browser based online thing. If you only want close to free, there's StarOffice. If you want totally free, there's OpenOffice.

If you want online, there's Google now. More players are on the horizon.

Sure, there is a slight movement towards online web applications, lead by email, online music services and, most importantly, online banking. I say most importantly because the banking industry has spent millions and made progress convincing people that they can bank online without getting robbed blind.

But here's the thing. Until corporate America decides that it can create and perhaps store all of its important and confidential documents online, online word processing and storage isn't happening. Not in the business world.

Add to that the strict confidentiality requirements imposed on doctors, lawyers and bankers and the market continues to shrink.

So while Google will get some mindshare because it is Google, I don't see many businesses moving all of their document management online. For security reasons. Because of inertia by risk aversion. And because they would have to retrain all of their people.

That's not to say this won't hurt Microsoft, because the home and educational user base is important to Microsoft. Should some computer maker start giving Google Office as a cheaper alternative to Office or Works, then Microsoft will feel a little pain. Remember the Dell deal to put Google bloatware on new Dells?

It may even be forced to scrap the faux Office Live and do a real one.

This deal is going nowhere as far as business users go. But it will sting Microsoft a little bit.

And maybe that was the point all along.

Deconstructing Dave

So Dave and Scoble (still on his Memeorandum hiatus) were talking. They agreed that the blogosphere has become as flammable as mailing lists and usenet newsgroups. I don't really agree with that, but this isn't a poll.

Dave says there are some topics that you can't talk about without inciting a flame-war, and he does his best not to incite one by not mentioning what those topics are. At least not directly.

Then he says there aren't many people doing the flaming, but that they control discourse because they control who gets to "speak at the conferences."

Ah, conferences. Camps, mashups, gatherings, happening, Techcrunches. We're back on the "my nerd camp is better than your nerd camp thing," with an ironic twist of Gatekeeping thrown in for good measure.

I have some questions about these conferences that I hope someone will answer for me.

Maybe these Conferences are...Different

But let me digress just a little. I typically give between 15-20 speeches a year. Not in Mike Arrington's back yard- I'll never make it on that invitation list. Rather, I speak at conferences, seminars and conventions about boring things like real estate development and the music business. These events are attended by people in the business, but not really because they are the place to be seen or because they are more fun than a party at Mike's place.

The truth is that people attend them primarily to meet the continuing education requirements mandated by their licensing state. Sure, there's a lot of networking at some of the big ones, but most of the time getting required continuing education hours is the focus.

Of course, this guarantees an audience as people who would prefer to be elsewhere have to get so many hours of continuing education a year.

I speak at these events not because I think they're more fun than Disneyland, but because sometimes people hear me speak and then hire me to do their legal work. It's marketing, plain and simple.

The Cost of Being Seen

Which brings me back to the conferences Dave is talking about. Since he is talking about flaming in the context of the blogosphere, I assume these conferences are related at least in some material way to blogging and the blogosphere.

Who goes to these things? Do they pay lots of money to attend? Is it like a geek Oscar party where it not the party but the being invited that counts? Are there actual customers in attendance or only vendors and journalist types? Who are the customers of a conference about blogging? Isn't it a little like preaching to the choir?

How many people attend these things? Is there a big group of people who travel from one to the next like some sort of Grateful Geek nation? Are there Daveheads? Is Dave a bigger celebrity than Ken? If they played checkers, who would win?

Do the people who attend these conferences have jobs? Is going to these conferences a part of their job? Do their companies pay for them to go to these conferences? Can I get a gig like that?

OK, so a lot of that is tongue in cheek.

But I don't get the turf wars that seem to be ongoing over these conferences, camps, mashups, whatever the unnecessary synonym of the day is. What is the turf that someone is trying to protect? And why?

And One More Thing

And here's another thing, what kind of conference lets somebody flame someone else from the podium without giving the recipient a chance to respond? I've never been to nerd camp but I have logged hundreds of hours behind the podium and I have never once witnessed anything like that- and if you think the egos at nerd camp are bigger than the ones at law or music camp, think again.

In fact, I have seen sponsors make time for someone who wasn't on the agenda to present an opposing view point. How can we triangulate from a single data point?

Unless these conference are more cage match than college, anyone who lets people stand up and trash someone else just because they don't get along isn't doing a very good job of running a conference.

I Know You Are, But What Am I?

I don't understand about 80% of what Dave and Scoble were talking about that got distilled into Dave's post, but I still agree with Dave that once the issue becomes one of personality instead of issues, the conversation has been irreparably tainted and it is time to find someone else to talk to.

I enjoy the conversational nature of the blogosphere, and I particularly enjoy hearing someone explain why I need to rethink my position about things. Otherwise it's just one big echo chamber. But some people just can't handle disagreement, and so anyone who disagrees must be stupid or evil. I just tune those folks out, which makes them even madder. Shake the scorpion a little and it will sting itself to death. And all that.

So Give Me the Goods

What am I missing about these conferences that gets everybody in a tither?

UPDATE: Christopher Carfi taught me most of what I have been able to gather about these conferences via this excellent post, which I came across just now. I still don't really know what an unconference is. Is is like 7-Up?

It's time for Round 11 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10

Here are the contestants for Round 11:

Streamload
Ta-da Lists
Feedsky
JellyBarn
Nativetext
Congoo
Podzinger
RSS Mad
FeedTier
Phanfare
Wikipedia
Fruitcast
PubSub

Streamload is a place to store, orgianize and share audio and video files. It also provides a way to backup files and access them from any internet connected computer.

Ta-da Lists is a place to make and share to-do lists. I hope my wife never finds out about this site. There's a free version and a more powerful one that's part of the Backpack service.

Feedsky shows up in gibberish on my computer. It looks like it uses a font I don't have or something.

JellyBarn is a photo sharing service. It's still in invitation only beta.

Native Text translates RSS feeds and podcasts into foreign languages. The main page says the translations are done by humans. It's not yet open to the public, so no RanchoCast in Russian.

Congoo says it is a premium content search engine. It looks like it will index subscription content. Neat idea if the publishers will go for it.

Podzinger is a podcast directory with a twist. Podcasts are transcribed and searchable by word. The transcription is not perfect, but it's good enough to be very useful. I've used Podzinger for a while and really like it.

RSS Mad is an RSS feed archive and an online feed reader. Looks sort of interesting, but no Newsome.Org in the database.

FeedTier says it generates web feeds for web pages without existing syndication. This is a great idea and I'd use it all the time if it worked. I couldn't get it to work, but I will certainly go back and try again.

Phanfare is a photo and video storage and sharing site. It allows you to make online photo and video albums. $6.95 a month after the free trial.

Wikipedia is a free, collaborative online encyclopedia. I use it and link to it all the time at Newsome.Org.

Fruitcast is a podcast advertising network. This is the first one of those I have seen and, sadly, ads in podcasts are probably inevitable.

PubSub is a content matching service that instantly notifies you when new content is created that matches your subscription.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

5 out of 13.

And the Winner of Round 11 is:

A very hard draw, as there were number of good contestants. I really dig Podzinger, but you just can't not pick Wikipedia

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

Om Malik reports on rumors that Google is in talks to buy Writely, an online word processor. Acquisition of Writely would give Google another arrow in its quiver of applications aimed directly at Microsoft Office.

Om has a chart in his post that compares the prospective office productivity offerings of both Microsoft and Google. The only one that matters is the bottom row which is the price:

Microsoft $350-$499......Google Free.

I know Google has a ton of money. I know they have to find a way to justify the still lofty stock price. I know they are building internets, giving ad-serving computers to the economically disadvantaged, and tossing $90 million of chump change at a click-fraud lawsuit.

But what I really, really, really want to know is how Google intends to make money off of this stuff.

Because I'll tell you what. If the only revenue stream they can come up with is selling more ads, there's a world of hurt waiting out there somewhere. The online ad game is cyclical, fickle and cannot support the billions of dollars of capital investments that Google is making.

The whole free web application business is becoming a dangerous house of cards based on a faulty premise- the continued flow of online ad sales.

So I'd like to know exactly how Google expects to make money off of this stuff. That's all that matters.

Traffic without revenue is meaningless.

Jim McGee talks about triangulation and the citizen media movement represented by the blogosphere.

I have always tended to believe the consistencies that arise among competing forces, particularly when those forces are non-cooperative with each other and have non-parallel goals. Jim talks about how a wide and diverse collection of viewpoints can help you navigate through the often noisy and conflicting blogosphere.

Jim's post is thought provoking, and the article he wrote for the Enterprise Systems Journal (linked in his post) is as well.

I got my Sprint phone in the mail today. Sprint is running a marketing campaign that involves handing out a free phone and 6 months of free service to selected people in certain cities. Since I am aware of several other bloggers who were asked to participate in this program, I imagine Sprint got my name via my blog.

The phone is a Sprint Power Vision phone, model A920, manufactured by Samsung. It comes with a charger, headphones, a USB cable to connect to your computer and a 32MB memory card (the phone has a slot).

It's a pretty compelling deal. They gave me 6 months of free voice and data service, including web access, music downloads, etc. This will allow me to really put this phone through its paces and write about it a little bit. After 6 months, I get to keep the phone, but I have to buy service if I want to use it.

I will be comparing it to my current phone, which I bought the day before I got the email from Sprint (I've always been a master of bad timing).

So here are my initial impressions.

It's a good looking phone, with a big, bright colorful screen. Other than figuring out how to turn it on, I haven't had to consult the user manual at all. It came all set up with a new phone number (Missouri area code) and email address (ambassador7365@sprintpcs.com - feel free to drop me a line- no spam please - but I haven't tried it so I can't guarantee I'll get it).

So far here are the cool things I've discovered. The phone is connected to a music store, where you can buy a wide selection of songs. I downloaded The Rolling Stones' Monkey Man, and the sound is really good, even without the headphones. I'm not sure I'd pay the usual $2.50 for a song, but thankfully I didn't have too.

The web access seems pretty fast, maybe even faster than my current phone, which uses the Verizon wireless broadband network. More on this after I experiment a little.

I have only begun to explore the media features. Movies, TV shows, Sirius radio and a ton of other stuff is available.

And it has a camera that seems to work really well (this is my first camera phone). I haven't tried it yet, but you can send your photos directly to supported third party photo sites. Flickr doesn't seem to be supported yet (that will be my first feedback), but you can email your photos to Flickr. Here's my first camera phone photo ever.

Like my 7130e, this phone can also be used as a modem to allow your laptop to access the internet over Sprint's wireless broadband network.

So far I'd have to say I'm pretty impressed. I suspect using all of the features would be a little costly if you had to pay for them, but so far, so cool.

This is the another installment in my series of favorite records. The list so far is here.

There's nothing I like better than well written, dark and brooding songs. No one does this better than Gerald Collier. The former frontman of the Best Kissers in the World (a fine band in its own right) has four released and a couple of unreleased records that are uniformly excellent. By excellent, I mean dark and brooding. With great writing, playing and singing.

But the best and most brooding of them all is his first one, 1996's is I Had to Laugh Like Hell.

There are 12 songs on this fine record, from the downward spiral of Boozin' Time and the biting I Ain't the One You Hate. This is good stuff to listen to in an empty house, with all the lights turned off, the windows open and a bottle of whiskey in your hand.

I know Gerald a little, via email. He lives in Austin now, and normally you can get more of his music, including an excellent unreleased record and a great live one, via his website. He told me last week that his web site is down, at least temporarily. I hope Gerald gets another record deal and I hope his website comes back online, because he's one talented dude.

Technorati Tags:
top 50 albums, record reviews

Phil Sim, one of my favorite bloggers, has a great and accurate article today about the Web 2.0 madness. His post ought to be read as a companion piece by anyone who remotely agrees with my Play Dough theory on Web 2.0.

Among Phil's points is that Google Calendar will simultaneously take away a preferred exit strategy and strike a deadly blow to many of the hundred thousand or so Web 2.0 online calendars (many of which have been contestants in my Web 2.0 Wars series). Moreso, but similar, to how GDrive will strike a blow to any unestablished online storage service (Box.Net being one that may have enough legs to outrun the bullet).

We ran into some of this back in the day with ACCBoards.Com as we sought out big media partners. We'd get asked "why should I pay you to run an interactive site when we can do the same thing you're doing and pay you nothing?" My answer, of course, was that we had all the traffic. We partnered up with Cox Cable and Jefferson Pilot Sports for years.

These Web 2.0 companies don't have the traffic to trade for a purchase price.

That's the biggest flaw in the sell yourself to Google as an exit strategy.

We are getting closer and closer to a Web 2.0 shake up. It's coming.

This is part twenty of my A-Z review of Scoble's feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

I've already done A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R and S.

Lots of T's and here are my favorites:

Things that Make You Go Hmmm (RSS Feed)

This is Jordon Cooper's Weblog (RSS Feed)

Things that Make You Go Hmmm is a great tech-oriented blog. Very interesting and informational content.

Jordon Cooper's blog talks about theology, digital culture and technology.

Honorable Mention:

Techcrunch (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I already read it)

Tech.Memeorandum (RSS Feed) (ineligible for the same reason)

Techdirt (RSS Feed) (ineligible for the same reason)

Thomas Hawk (RSS Feed) (ineligible for the same reason)

Scoble reports that Microsoft has bought Onfolio.

Assuming they didn't pay nutty money, this is a great acquisition by Microsoft. I am a long time user of Onfolio and have sung its praises here before.

Scoble, please tell your guys to figure out a way to use Onfolio with FolderShare to allow us to synch our Onfolio content across computers, including (and this is important) what RSS feeds have already been read. Stop whatever you're doing and go tell them that.

My Duke loving pal Buzz Bruggeman is another fan of Onfolio. And while he doesn't know how to pick a college, he certainly knows good software when he sees it.

I wonder if Onfolio will become a part of One Note or remain a separate program.

JK (my mobile technology guru), want to venture a guess?

Here's how to make a buzzkill, courtesy of Microsoft.

So first Microsoft tosses out Office Live, only without the Office part. This confuses everyone in sight, including the best thing Microsoft has going for it, Robert Scoble.

Then we get 2006 a Flash Odyssey, giving us the vague feeling that something revolutionary is afoot. Scoble, having inexplicably been previously out of the loop, begins immediately and correctly trying to deflate the hype overload that Microsoft's non-existent or bad (I can't tell which) marketing department was engendering. He keeps trying, but Microsoft's Fox Mulder-like approach to releasing details makes people believe that Origami will be made from Saturn's rings and delivered by aliens.

By this time, there's nothing Scoble can do. Yet, as he falls beneath the stampede he thrusts his pen once again at the problem.

By the time the truth is known, there is only one possible reaction: disappointment.

Now instead of a lot of talk about what Origami is and what it can do, there will be a lot of you've got to be kidding and is this what all the fuss was about.

Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Fred Wilson is excited about AOL opening up AIM (sort of) to third party developers for incorporation into their products. He challenges AOL to take the only step that matters by allowing interoperability with the other IM applications. Jason Calacanis, who now works for AOL, agrees.

Letting developers build on top of AOL is fine. Steve Rubel points out the potential benefits to marketers via add-ons like AIM bots and feed alerts.

But this is a half step up a giant staircase. Rather than a parade and confetti, we need to be looking and AOL and saying "And......what else???"

Until IM applications are like phones, IM will never, ever be adopted by the masses. Text messaging has already passed IM in race for the instant communication mindshare primarily because you don't need 5 cell phones in your pocket to make it work. Text messaging works cross-provider.

The IM race is still being run by closed, proprietary horses because they are competing based on user base and not on features and reliability. AIM has most of the AOL users (though you do not have to be an AOL customer to use it) and a large base of other users. Yahoo (the only company that can compete head to head with Google based on anything other than a large war chest of dollars) has a big user base. Microsoft has a program that is embedded into Windows, a large user base and a war chest of billions it can use to remain in the game. Google launched Google Talk, which promptly faded only to suffer relentless CPR at the hands of Gmail.

Each of these companies wants to win the user base war. Sharing protocols and allowing interconnectivity would turn IM programs into a commodity. These companies who are competing to become the one-stop internet shop for the masses do not want IM programs to become a commodity. Certainly AOL, trying unsuccessfully to stem the flow from behind the walls of its newbie castle, doesn't want to give those newbies one more reason to cross the moat into the real internet.

Unless and until the day anyone can IM anyone else, all of this talk about IM applications is much ado about nothing.

In August of last year I wrote about the IM situation. I can't sum it up any better today than I did then:

Until IM programs become like telephones, where the provider and the manufacturer of the telephone have nothing to do with who you can and can't call, IM will simply not be adopted by grown-ups and businesses.

And that's really too bad. IM could have been a contender.

Your lips are moving
I cannot hear
You voice is soothing
But the words aren't clear
You don't sound different
I've learned the game
I'm looking through you
You're not the same
- The Beatles

Seth Finkelstein and Ethan Johnson are talking about marginalization in the blogosphere.

This is a complex and touchy issue, but here are my thoughts.

Common Sense and Fairness

Many, many times I have read things on a blog that have already been talked to death on other blogs. What's OK and not OK in that situation is a "know it when you see it" sort of thing. Clearly if someone links to another blogger or engages him in a cross-blog conversation, then it would be wrong of him to restate what was said as if it were his own original thought.

On the other hand, if I talk about an issue today, some other blogger might talk about the same issue next week or next month, perhaps in a similar fashion, without ever having seen my post. The blogosphere is a big place and it's impossible to know what everybody said today, much less in the past.

Maybe I'm being naive again, but I think if you apply common sense and fairness, these things will take care of themselves. And if you don't, someone (be it Seth, Ethan, Kent or somebody we don't know yet) will probably let you know.

But No Footnotes Please

Blogs are not generally research articles (thank goodness). But fairness is fairness, so some rules should apply.

It boils down to a couple of things.

First, the whole greater mindshare/Gatekeeper thing. I've had my say about that issue and, pending any new perspectives, I'm not going to rehash it all over again. It's there. It's not as bad as some think. Most of it is natural; a little bit of it is designed to exclude. But you can get inside the gates. Yada, yada, yada.

More importantly, and the thing this conversation makes me wonder about, is whether there is some implied duty to do a Technorati or Google search before you post something to see if someone else has already covered it (or in the case of a new discovery, already dis-covered it).

How Much is Enough

I generally search a little on a topic before I post on it to make sure I have at least most of my facts right and to look for other relevant and helpful links. Most of the time, I do this via a Technorati tag search. Once in a while (though much less often) I'll do a Google search. But I don't know that a search should be a requirement prior to posting about a topic.

It's one thing if someone knows another writer has uncovered something new. In that case, I think a link ought to be included back to the original story. But the internet is a big place and if I have to do vast research before posting on something, then I'm not going to post very much.

If I were to accidentally jump to the front of the line on an issue, however, I would hope someone would let me know in an email or Comment, in which case I would (and should) supplement with a mention, link, etc.

Looking Through

I fully understand the frustration that occurs when someone posts something that you've already covered and it gets treated like earth shattering news. I protested (mildly) via satire when that happened about this very same Gatekeeper issue.

I don't want to come off sounding like I can't relate to the desire to be heard, because I can. And whether I write this blog for another year or 20 years, I will always do what I can to find and invite new voices to the table.

Sure, some people (and I think it's a relatively small number) hand out links like medals. But given the communal nature of the blogosphere, those folks are their own worst enemy. And their numbers will decline over time as the blogosphere continues to flatten.

Just because someone doesn't speak to you doesn't mean they are ignoring you. They just may not have seen you.

It's time for Round 9 in Newsome.Org's Web 2.0 Wars. The contestants and rules are here.

Prior Rounds: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9

Here are the contestants for Round 10:

Riya
Audible Wordcast
Opinity
Reddit
MeasureMap
Gumshoo
Bluepulse
Imvu

***There's a little green dot at the end of the line I can't read, so it's not included.

Riya is a photo sharing service with a twist. It has face and text recognition capability that help you identify and name your photos. I haven't used it, but it has received lots of positive press in the blogosphere.

Audible Wordcast is a service that allows users to manage, measure and monetize podcasts. It uses a proprietary audio format and allows you to include advertising in your podcast (just what we need, more advertising). You can sign up for their fancy package and sell (yes sell) the right to listen to your podcast on the Wordcast site. Let me know how that works out for you.

Opinity is a "reputation services company." Somehow you can check out a person by filling in a form. Sounds sort of creepy to me.

Reddit is a link aggregator where users vote stories up and down, similar to (but much less known than) Digg. Well designed site, but as I have said, the news by contest thing doesn't really work for me.

MeasureMap is a stats tracking service for blogs. The front page says it's free, but you have to request an invitation.

Gumshoo is an eBay auction risk analyzer and misspelling search. It's supposed to help you find stuff easier and avoid auction fraud

Bluepulse has something to do with mobile technology. Its vaguely written About page and the lack of an FAQ make it seem more like an online version of Myst. Get an FAQ already.

Imvu is a 3D Instant Message application. You chat via a 3D avatar.

Before Today I'd Heard of:

1 out of 8.

And the Winner of Round 10 is:

Riya in a cakewalk.

Technorati Tags:
newsome.org web wars, web 2.0

After reading about Second Life at Scoble's blog and elsewhere, I gave it a try tonight. My thoughts later, but first a question.

Is this related to that deal that AOL (or maybe it was Compuserve?) launched or almost did 10 or so years ago? A long, long time ago I was a beta tester for something very similar. I can't remember what it was called- maybe something "scapes?" Anyway, I was a beta tester along with a ton of other people, which meant we had many months of free service. It was pretty amazing by the standards of the day. Once it went live, I didn't want to pay for it, so I never signed up. That spelled the end of my great avatars, Fritz the Cat and Shakes the Clown.

Anybody remember what I'm talking about?

So tonight I sign up (Ezra Snickerdoodle) and create a cyber-Kent/Ezra and wonder around the place a bit. Again, this is very, very similar to that deal I talked about above.

It is a pretty cool deal, but I really need to go when someone I know will be there, since I'm not much into the chat scene and am probably about 100 years older than the next oldest person in there.

The one problem I had, which is what made me stop playing Doom back in the day, is that I start feeling motion sick when I walk or fly (I had that dream as a kid) around.

I don't know that Second Life has much appeal for me, but I can sure see how kids would dig it.

Doc Searls had some very nice things to say about my podcast. Thanks Doc, I really appreciate it.

As I mentioned on my most recent podcast and as Doc mentioned in his post, it's sort of hard to get a podcast started. With blogs, you can tell via comments and links and whatnot roughly how many people are reading and responding to what you write.

With podcasting, it's a little harder to tell. Yes, you get subscriber numbers (I forgot they made numbers that low), but a lot of people, myself included, listen to podcasts via their computer, without subscribing. Heck, I don't even own an iPod. Plus, podcasts are not yet the interactive creations that blogs are, so there's less of a chance for people to give you feedback.

Doc is a member of my favorite podcast, the Gillmor Gang, and has some podcast related content on one of his web sites. I listen to the Gillmor Gang regularly and have wondered aloud why no one has done a Texas or other regional version of the group tech podcast. As an aside, if anyone who knows how to do a group podcast is interested in talking about doing one, drop me a line.

Anyway, I have been doing my RanchoCast podcasts since early December of last year. The mix is country rock, Americana, tech talk and blues. Over the past few episodes (and primarily on the last one), I have started talking a bit more about topics I have written about here. Surprisingly (at least to me), a few people have written me to say they enjoyed that part of the episode. Richard Querin tells me I explained my position on the whole Gatekeeper business better verbally than I did in writing.

All of this got me thinking a little about my podcast strategy.

Here's my current plan, but I welcome suggestions. I'm figuring this out as we go, so don't hesitate to tell me what I should or shouldn't be doing.

First, I am going to make tech talk a regular part of the mix. My ideal split would be about 60/40 music to tech talk. I'd love to have guests, but I think it would be presumptive to think anyone would want to guest on my podcast. But if you write or think about tech and would like to guest, drop me a line. I would be happy to have any of the Web 2.0 developers on to talk about their product (just be ready to answer my first question: other than ads, what are your revenue streams?). So guests or not, I'm going to make tech talk a slightly bigger part of the mix.

Second, I am going to excerpt the non-music stuff and make it available separately- like I did with part of the tech talk last time. I don't know if this is necessary, but I don't want to lose listeners who only want to hear the tech talk- particularly if I have guests. If it looks like I should tweak the split or even split the podcast in two (I'd probably just alternate weekly between talking and doing music), I'll consider that as well.

Third, I am going to do what I can to join up (either as a guest or in a group thing) with some other podcasters. I don't know what opportunities are out there, but I am going to look around for them. I really like the give and take of the Gillmor Gang and would love to be a part of something similar to that. Of course, that's sort of like saying I want to do something similar to David Letterman. So I'll keep my expectations in check.

The more experience I get listening to and creating podcasts, the more I enjoy them.

So that's my current plan. Please let me know if I've got it all wrong, or if you have any thoughts or suggestions.

After trying many online feed readers and after a rough start, I settled on Bloglines as my primary feed reader. I want an online reader, because I want things read here to show as read there.

In general, I think Bloglines does a lot right. It's faster than the other online readers I have tried, including some that you have to- gasp- pay for.

But it could be so much better.

Why, for example, are there some feeds that just will not work in Bloglines? I read Dwight Silverman every day, but not via Bloglines. It simply will not pull his feed (and I have the new RSS feed address).

And why aren't there more options when you subscribe to a feed? I organize my reading list by the name of the blogger, as opposed to the blog name. So I have to sign up and then go back in and edit the name. Not the end of the world, but there's no reason this can't be handled on the front end.

Finally, has anyone ever had a problem resolved by emailing Bloglines? For some frustrating reason Bloglines shows my main page as "index.html," which is both unnecessary (you don't need to page address; just use www.newsome.org/) and wrong (it's index.shtml). This means that people who try to click over to the main page from within bloglines get an error message (fortunately, the post pages have the correct URLs so clicking to a post page works properly). I've emailed tech support three times about this and no one has replied, other than via a canned response that they received my email and will look into it. Blah, blah, blah.

Dwight has a very timely article today on email tech support. Someone at Bloglines needs to read it. Put it on the bulletin board. Memorize it.

Here's the thing.

No one has a secret formula where feed reading is concerned. So all of the feed readers do the same thing, as far as the big stuff goes. The war for market share will be won on the battleground of the little things.

And Bloglines isn't doing the little things right.

I'm not ready to switch yet, but I'm starting to think about it. And that's not the way to keep customers.

Slippin', slippin' into the future.

And in the time wasting department comes news that consumer groups are going to fight the AT&T Bellsouth merger.

After that, maybe Pee Wee Hermann can fight Lenox Lewis. And then maybe Dr. Ruth can play one on one with Shaquille O'Neal. Dino from the Flintstones versus Godzilla and King Kong.

I'm all about being heard. And I'm all about the little guy. Heck, I'm a long time subscriber to Consumer Reports and I give money to Greenpeace.

So some part of me wants to applaud when I read that Consumers Union and the Consumer Federation of America are going to fight the man. But not really.

Because the U.S., particularly the business part of it, is all about the almighty dollar. And at some point if you continue to stand between the man and his money, you're just wasting your time.

Why not take that time and money and use it where it might be able to make a difference.

An article today at SiliconValley.com confirms what people have been expecting for some time: that the flow of new internet users in the U.S. has slowed dramatically.

This is the first cousin of the early adoption effect I talked about in the context of growth in the blogosphere and, while certainly a little troubling for the internet industry, shouldn't be surprising.

And I don't think it's as bad as it may appear.

Two things will result in new user growth over the coming years. Both have to do with my suspicion that a disproportionate share of non-internet users fall into the categories of senior citizens and the economically disadvantaged.

To the very young, the internet is as integral to their daily lives as the telephone and the television. Most teenagers use the internet the way my generation used the phone when we were kids- as a way to stay connected with friends. They can't remember a time when there wasn't an internet, so there was no learning curve to overcome. As these kids grow up and have kids, the percentage of people who use the internet to one degree or another will continue to rise. Even economically disadvantaged kids have increasing access to the internet, either at school or via afternoon programs and neighborhood facilities.

Greater availability to the economically disadvantaged will be the other factor that drives growth. The problem is getting computers in the homes where people can more fully integrate them into their lives. There are a couple of factors that will help. One, computers are no longer the mystical, expensive devices they once were. Today, for about the price of a cell phone, you can buy a good computer. Two, the move by Google and others to create a cheaper method to access the internet may afford these computers an on-ramp to the internet. I made fun of Google's plan to build another internet, but a computer with ads is certainly better than no computer at all.

Part of the 18% who say they aren't interested in the internet are in one of both of those groups. And some part of that number, be they old or young, rich or poor, would develop interest in the internet if they knew more about it and had easy, affordable internet access.

The bottom line is that the early adopters have adopted, as have a lot of the utility users- the second phase who use the internet not because it's cool, but because it is useful. But there are a lot of other potential users who will join the party as their generation ages and as the cost of admittance goes down.

Frank Gruber has launched a very good looking baseball blog in anticipation of the upcoming season. He's a Chicago fan, but he doesn't know any better so we can't hold that against him.

Baseball Frank is going on my reading list.

So Dave Winer says there are too many blogospats and calls out Nick Carr for being snarky. I don't know what snarky means and I'm not interested enough in learning an unnecessary synonym to go look it up, but I don't think it's a compliment.

I seem to either wildly disagree or wildly agree with whatever Nick writes, and he may be as smart as his bio. Once again, I'm not interested enough to try to figure it out. I find smartness for smartness sake profoundly boring. But clearly he got under Dave's skin l